Defence of the Realm

the generals finally share the blame

2011-07-25T15:30:00.002+01:00

"Richard North, the author of Ministry of Defeat and independent blogger, has passionately written that the Committee report, more than the hacking scandal, has highlighted the flaws of both Parliament and the media.

James Arbuthnot and the members of the Defence Committee should have been aware of these issues long ago but they repeatedly failed to address them until now. North has also accused Arbuthnot of maintaining the myth of 'ministerial responsibility', the equivalent of Robinson's modern day 'stab-in-the-back'.

The media for all its interest in Afghanistan also failed to understand what was happening especially in terms of strategic questions and civil-military relations. Newspapers like the Sun and the Daily Mail chose to vilify Gordon Brown while making Generals like Sir Richard Dannatt the honourable soldier.

The Sun as well as the Mail have both been oddly quiet on reporting the Committee's findings, no surprise. The Sun's sister paper The Times, to its credit, did publish this article last year which mirrored this week's committee findings".

It's a good piece ... well, I would say that - but it still is. Read it and then buy the book. I need the money.

COMMENT THREAD

Failure writ large

2011-07-19T15:32:00.000+01:00

It's not just the British press, police and politicians that are in crisis, writes Michael White for The Guardian. "Spare a thought for Britain's armed forces, who are risking life and limb in support of state policy, while those of us at home hyperventilate over a squalid political row".

My immediate response to this is "speak for yourself, mate". We did a lot more than spare a thought over the weekend and we – unlike the scumset and associated turd-eaters - are by no means hyperventilating over a media storm.

This, though, is a Guardian journalist with a narrative to sell, a man who, from the depths of the most profound and disturbing ignorance, tells us that, while most weekend attention was focused on the Murdochs, the police and the politicians, the Commons defence select committee issued "a powerful condemnation" of the way the mission to Helmand was handled from day one.

Mr White is, of course, far too grand to read independent blogs but, if he had, he might have seen the alternative view expressed. From that he would have learned that, far from offering "a powerful condemnation", the select committee's analysis was weak and its conclusions tepid.

The clue to the direction of the narrative, though, is White's views on the select committee report. The interesting thing is, he says, "that its ire is not directed against the late Labour government or the then-defence secretary, John Reid".

Instead, he writes, "it is focussed on the top military brass who underestimated the threat from the ever-resourceful Taliban ("you have the watches, but we have the time") and told Reid there were enough helicopters to provide air support when there were not. Ministers were not told the risk level, which later proved fatal to so many young lives".

Now here comes the rub. White describes the committee chairman, Tory ex-defence minister James Arbuthnot, as "soft-spoken but solid". But what he does not say is that he was one of the "good ol' boys", part of the Tory defence claque, who actually maintained the myth – right through the critical period – of ministerial responsibility. It was all Brown's fault, remember?

I recall of the period, from 2006, when I watched every defence debate online, and then read the transcripts. I knew most of the personalities involved, and could read the mood music. Defence then was a political football, the mantras of "over-stretch" and "underfunding" being chanted with semi-religious fervour. The Generals were lauded and praised. Dannatt was treated as a demi-god.

Anyone who had half a brain and a little inside knowledge could work it out. I had a lot of inside knowledge ... through parliamentary and other contacts. Furthermore, I was writing consistently on this theme, culminating in October 2009 when I wrote a piece headed, "The generals must share the blame", celebrating the fact that, at last, the Spectator had published a half-decent piece.

This was by Paul Robinson, professor in the Graduate School of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, whence I noted that, after years of ploughing the solitary furrow, pointing out that the military should bear some of the blame for the (then) current parlous state of our Armed Forces, and their lacklustre performance in first Iraq and now Afghanistan, only now did the magazine pop up saying the same thing.

In my own piece, I had referred to a particularly trenchant piece of my own in April 2009, where I wrote of "the real enemy in Whitehall" – the MoD.

All this was evident at the time – to the politicians and to the specialist correspondents like Michael White. Yet all of them chose to hold their fire, and focus instead on the Ministers, playing a dirty, devious and thoroughly dishonest game. And only now, are the likes of Arbuthnot – the Tory politician who no longer wishes to put Ministers in the frame - prepared to admit that the military was the author of its own downfall.

What I wrote on Sunday, therefore, is even more evident today. We have had and have now, two egregious failures. Firstly, Parliament – and the long-stop of the Defence Committee, failed to pick up what was going on. Secondly, the media likewise failed, and then failed to note that the Defence Committee was completely dysfunctional.

I despair in writing this. Even as I write, we have a three-ring media circus, centred around the proceedings of a select committee, chaired by an acknowledged crook, grandstanding for all it is worth. The same failed system represented by the Defence Committee, reported by a failing media.

From it, nothing of any substance will come and, in truth, no one seems to care. The soap opera is everything. The hard, grown-up job of analysing what is going wrong, and coming up with serious solutions, seems beyond the capabilities of anyone involved.

We are going nowhere with this, and nothing will be solved. In due course, the circus will pack up its tents and move on to another show, and we'll be none the wiser. Except that, before this show is even over, real life outside the tent will take a hand. While these fools play, the economy and the world order is falling apart.

Damn them all to hell, for their foolishness, their stupidity and their venality. We deserve better than this.

COMMENT THREAD

An unrecognised fracture

2011-07-17T15:31:00.001+01:00

Grudgingly, one has to acknowledge that there is a small residue of adult behaviour left in The Sunday Telegraph, it having devoted a tiny part of its output today to a subject far more important than the media "self" obsession. And it has the grace to admit that it is far more important.

The real scandal, it thus says, "is not hacking but Helmand", as it comments on its own report of the Defence Committee report on Operations in Afghanistan, due out tomorrow - "a precise and shocking exposé of how British troops on duty in Helmand, Afghanistan, from 2006 onwards were routinely failed by their senior officers and government ministers". As scandals go, the paper says, it is among the very worst.

It has now been published online (although not yet as a .pdf) and I would concur with the generality of the comments, both in the report and the ST's assessment of it – but with several important caveats, not least the extreme superficiality of the report and its findings.

Most importantly, though, we are talking five years downstream, looking at what were predictable and avoidable flaws in the operation, which were clearly apparent at the time, and about which we were continuously writing. The committee records, for instance, concerns about protected vehicles, but only addresses this issue in terms of the Snatch Land Rover. Thus, it has Brigadier Butler say:

... we also knew before we deployed that we had something in the order of a 45 percent on average shortfall of vehicles. We had already identified that Snatch was not an appropriate vehicle for the desert. We wanted WMIKs and Pinzgauers, logistical vehicles, DROPS, container vehicles, equipment support vehicles, the small Scimitar CVRTs.

Butler is highly regarded in some quarters, but his comments here show a profound and alarming ignorance, and especially in respect of the WIMIKS, which were death traps, and the Pinzguaers (type pictured below), which could not have been more unsuitable if they tried.

And this we were writing about with some force in June 2006 and in the following month when we accused that Army and MoD of corporate manslaughter.

But such is the bizarre superficiality of the Committee that, to guide it through the Labyrinth, it chose to interview General Mike Jackson, the man who did more than most to ensure that our troops were ill-equipped - the man who put the Snatches in Basra.

From a man who would, had there been any justice, been tried and shot for incompetence (pour encourager les autres), the Committee thus did take down these immortal words:

The tactics and equipment required in any campaign are to some extent dictated by the methods of the enemy. General Jackson (p42) explained that the Taliban had moved from direct fighting to the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) which had changed the need for equipment:

[...] If you recall, in the first two summers the Taliban took us on, basically using fire and manoeuvre—small arms, basically—and each and every time, they were defeated tactically. We can discuss whether any operational-level progress had been made, but they were defeated tactically.

It took them rather longer, looking back, than one might have expected, but they obviously thought very hard, particularly after the second summer, 2007, and said, "We're not going to get anywhere taking on the British soldiers at what they do best; ergo we will find another way".

That brings us to the IED. That changes priorities on our side. Armoured vehicles suddenly go right up in terms of priority, because that is the way you protect the force. As I've already touched on, the dispersion put a greater premium on helicopters. Tactics and equipment will vary according to the operational circumstances. One has to respond. Ideally, you need to be one foot ahead, but that's not always possible.

The response to this, of course, is that it was possible to be "one foot ahead". Once again, we have to recall that, in June 2006 – over five years ago – Ann Winterton asked the defence secretary:

As our forces appear to be winning the firefights in Afghanistan, does he expect those who oppose our troops there and in other theatres to revert to the use of improvised explosive devices? If so, what vehicles are our forces to be equipped with to counter the threat?

The answer then was a classic in studied complacency. Defence minister Adam Ingram responded:

We have been very effective in Afghanistan. We have a potent force in the Apache attack helicopters. We are up against intelligent and capable enemies, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, and we know that they will continue to look for ways to attack land-based vehicles or air-based platforms. We have a lot of measures in place. The hon. Lady will understand that it is not appropriate to discuss all the detail, but where we identify a threat - be it a new or technological threat - we identify a quick way to deal with it. Sometimes that takes time as we come to understand the threat before developing the technical response. Our focus at all times is the protection of our personnel, whether it involves fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, land-based systems or maritime systems.

It is thus not as if our fears and concerns were not known in parliament at the time, but as Ann Winterton constantly brought them up in the House, they were just as constantly ignored. Had they been noted and addressed earlier, many lives could have been saved. Why then, we ask, is it only now that we are seeing "a precise and shocking exposé" from the Defence Committee, and one which still seems incapable of getting to grips with some of the detail?

To answer that, we only need to look at the committee chairman, James Arbuthnot, and record that, time-after-time, under his tutelage, the committee has pulled its punches.

In the context where we expect the military to make mistakes (that is what the military does, and is best at doing), and governments to cover-up, the long-stop is parliament, represented in particular by the select committee system. And on this issue – as with many others – it has failed. But Arbuthnot is one of the "good ol' boys", part of the Tory defence claque, who certainly weren't going to let Lady Ann rain on their self-congratulatory parade, much less listen to "voices off" from the far North.

It is, however, a little unfair to put all the blame on Arbuthnot, as chairman. As we recorded last year, the system is broken - and there are multiple fractures. And now, as then, as the chatterati obsesses about entirely the wrong things, we have been almost a lone voice in saying this. Today, in Arbuthnot's report, we see the result – too little, too late, letting the guilty men off the hook, after good men have died unnecessarily.

And while one newspaper sees part of the point, it is not sufficiently adult to realise where the true problem really lies. As we pointed out last year, a crucial part of the scrutiny system - and especially where parliament drops the ball - is the media. Here, the Sunday Telegraph leader does at least acknowledge that: "Our own columnist, Christopher Booker, protested in 2006 at the outrage of British troops in Southern Iraq being sent to meet their deaths in lightly-armoured Snatch Land Rovers, in conditions which also applied in Afghanistan".

But, as it was at the time, while the newspaper allowed Booker to pursue the issue in his column – with the research carried out by myself – it offered us no support. Instead, its own defence correspondent, Sean Rayment, followed a conflicting line, pushing for more Warriors, a theme he was to return to, even as Booker was pushing for the mine protected vehicle solution.

Thus, in the absence of any real exposure from The Sunday Telegraph it was the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times that gave the campaign the necessary kick-start and got it moving. And when it came to the Pinzgauer, Sean Rayment was also out to lunch, having swallowed the Army spin and given the vehicle an outrageous puff. Thus compromised, he was never to offer a word of criticism against the vehicle.

There is the the other part of your problem. It is one thing having a broken system – but when the media does not recognises that, and then exacerbates it by failing to do its own job, there can be no attempt to fix what is wrong.

And when the media think that next week's select committee hearing is "historic", we know we have a long, long way to go. When parliamentarians start asking each other why they have failed so transparently to do their own jobs, then and only then would they be in a position to start looking at the media. So far, there is no sign whatsoever of this happening.

COMMENT THREAD

Churnalism almost wins out

2011-07-01T00:02:00.002+01:00

From the press coverage of the Snatch Land Rover litigation, on which a judgement in the High Court was handed down yesterday, you would think that the case against the MoD had been lost. It hasn't. The campaigners trying to bring the Ministry of Defence to book, for knowingly fielding dangerously vulnerable equipment in Iraq, have won a qualified victory.

The impression that the case was lost comes from the misleading headline on the BBC report (above), but this owes its origin to a similarly misleading report from the Press Association, which completely misrepresents the situation.

The essence of the flawed report, which has been replicated hundreds of times in local and national media, is that "a High Court judge has blocked attempts by families of four soldiers killed in Iraq to seek compensation from the Government".

The soldiers concerned were Pte Phillip Hewett, of Tamworth, Staffordshire, Pte Lee Ellis, of Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, and Lance Cpl Kirk Redpath, 22, of Romford, Essex, all of whom were killed in Snatch Land Rovers, and Corporal Stephen Allbutt, 35, who was killed by "friendly fire" after his Challenger was hit by another.

Relatives, we are told, said the MoD failed to provide armoured vehicles or equipment which could have saved lives and should pay compensation. MoD lawyers, on the other hand, "said decisions about battlefield equipment are for politicians and military commanders and asked the High Court to stop compensation claims going forward". Then, says the report, "Mr Justice Owen ruled in favour of the MoD".

However, to project – by juxtaposition – that the judge accepted this particular MoD argument is simply false. As a spokeswoman for relatives' lawyers made clear, this was the MoD relying on the principle of "combat immunity", which removes any liability for exercising a "duty of care" in combat zones.

Here, the judge broke new ground. He refused to accept the principle, allowing Courtney, aged 10, daughter of Pte Lee Ellis, to proceed with a case of negligence. Similarly, the Challenger "friendly fire" case has been allowed through.

Where the Press Association had got itself confused is that there were two separate legs to the case. The first was the group of relatives, including Sue Smith, mother of Pte Hewett, who were not dependents, collectively seeking to make the MoD "... accountable for allowing their loved ones to go into combat in vehicles that were manifestly unsuitable for the job".

Because they were not dependents, they have no claim under common law and cannot seek damages for negligence under duty of care provisions. Before anyone can pursue a claim, the law requires them to prove they have suffered financial loss, which the relatives cannot or will not do.

Thus, this group of relatives have instead proceeded under Human Rights legislation (ECHR) and, since even that requires compensation to be claimed, the cases have been lodged in terms of the relatives seeking damages. However, as the entire group have constantly pointed out - articulated by Sue Smith - they are not interested in the money. This, in any case, is likely to be minimal, and soaked up by legal fees and repayment of legal aid. The relatives simply want the MoD brought to book.

Now, it is the ECHR leg of the case that has been blocked - on the grounds that the deceased soldiers were outside the jurisdiction of the UK at the time of their deaths because they were not in the UK nor on a British Army base. Therefore, it is held, the ECHR does not apply.

That the ECHR case would be rejected was actually an expected development, especially after the Jason Smith case. When I spoke to Sue Smith after the judgement, she was not at all dismayed. There are other, different cases being heard which may settle this point – or these cases themselves may end up in Strasbourg.

But on the negligence issue, ground really has been broken. And, for once, the loss-making Guardian has got it right, a distinction shared by the Belfast Telegraph. Both note that, relying on the principle of "combat immunity", the ministry had argued that this was a complete legal defence for incidents that took place in war zones.

The judge, says the papers, disagreed. In The Guardian, he is cited as saying: "There can be no doubt that the [MoD] is under a general duty to provide adequate training, suitable equipment and a safe system of work for members of the armed forces". Thus Courtney's claim, plus claims by Cpl Allbutt's widow, Debi, and Dan Twiddy and Andy Julien – two soldiers injured in the Challenger - could continue.

Before all the misleading publicity, a ministry spokesman had declared that: "The courts have upheld our arguments on Article 2 of the ECHR. We will be seeking leave to appeal against the decision about liability claims for equipment provision".

Latterly, Sky News got the news mostly right – but still with a misleading headline. The Mirror became a late entrant, correcting its earlier story - as did the Mail, while The Sun continues to get it wrong. Interestingly, the Failygraph does not carry a report at all.

Nevertheless, the manoeuvring continues. Those who lost their lives in Snatch Land Rovers – as well as the Challenger set - are one step closer to getting their day in court. Unfortunately, due to the bulk of the media and its churnalism, most people will never realise what has happened.

COMMENT THREAD

Doing the honest thing

2011-06-29T08:37:00.002+01:00

A splendidly indignant Peter Hitchens is fulminating about "Dave" doing the talking (telling the military to shut up and do the fighting), while the war dead from Afghanistan are to be sneaked out of the back gate of RAF Brize Norton when it takes over from Lyneham (a few weeks from now) as the arrival point for the fallen.

They will then be routed down side roads to avoid nearby Carterton – a town almost exactly the same size as Wootton Bassett – and make their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford along A-roads and bypasses. There'll be a small guard of honour near the hospital entrance (there already is) but somehow or other the cortege won't go down any High Streets, thus avoiding what has become a media circus.

All of this, however, has to be viewed in the context of the complete and utter failure of the Afghanistan campaign, typified by the experience of the Kajaki power project in Afghanistan, as narrated by the BBC's Mark Urban on yesterday's Newsnight, and repeated today in a BBC documentary.

He refers to a series of the heroic adventures, starting in 2007 and culminating in August 2008 with thousands of British troops taking part in an operation to escort a 200-ton turbine to the Kajaki Dam on the Helmand River, 100 miles north-west of Kandahar City.

The aim was to improve the hydro-electric scheme there, adding a turbine to the two already installed. This was part of a project that has so far cost more than £29 million, and was (and still is) regarded as an essential part of the hearts and minds campaign in the region.

But, three years after so much blood and treasure has been expended (albeit with the bulk of the cash being shelled out by the Americans), the third turbine lies unassembled – the parts littered about the weed-strewn site, exactly where they were left by the British military.

What makes this so desperately sad is that even the slightest knowledge of the history of the area would confirm that the project was never going to achieve its desired aim, even if it had been technically successful.

Not least of the problems was – as Booker recorded in September 2009 that the power lines and sub-stations which feed the electricity to several towns are controlled by the Taliban, who charge money to customers for allowing the juice to reach them.

So obvious, in fact, were the defects of the scheme that a year before, in September 2008, The Guardian, while acknowledging the "brilliant courage and ingenuity" of the British, dismissed it as a "glorious but dangerous folly".

The Kajaki, it said, has been a 90-metre-high, rock-filled demonstration of foreign good intentions for decades but has never delivered the promised benefits to Afghanistan - a political showpiece and always has been since it was built (but not fully completed) in the 1950s by the US to compete with Soviet projects elsewhere in the country.

Such was the delusional attachment to the scheme, however, that this brought a pained rebuttal from then defence secretary Des Browne. The project was not merely a symbol, he declared. "If it were only that, we would never have sent our people on such a risky mission".

Sense and analytical judgement, however, had been submerged in tales of derring-do, marking the self-declared "successful mission". Typical of the period, we got Lieutenant Colonel Rufus McNeil, Comanding Officer 13 Air Assault Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps, declaring of those that had run the hazardous convoy, "Every one of the soldiers did fantastically well."

Well, indeed they did, but it was still a complete waste of time, money, effort – and lives. By December 2009, The Guardian was back on the case with a report headed: "Taliban stalls key hydroelectric turbine project in Afghanistan". The strap read: "Convoy diverted British troops from front but generator may never be used".

The enormous hydroelectric turbine dragged at huge cost by British troops through Taliban heartlands last year, said the paper, may never be installed because NATO has been unable to secure a 30-mile stretch of road leading to an isolated dam in northern Helmand.

To install the turbine needed, amongst other things, 900 tons of cement for new foundations, but security had deteriorated to such an extent that British troops were having to be resupplied by air drop and helicopters. Even the BBC reported the problems.

Now, with additional US troops in the region – but for a short time only – USAid, which is managing the project, remains convinced that the project is worthwhile. US aid officials are now claiming that turbine could be installed in 24 to 30 months.

This is so much moonshine. No more now than in 2003 when then current project was first mooted, is this a feasible project. It remains, as always, a testament to the vain, unrealisable hopes of the coalition forces that they can bring peace and stability to Afghanistan.

Returning to Hitchens and his indignation, one recalls an episode during the London Blitz in 1940, when a cash-strapped council in the East End, finding rather fewer houses on its patch requiring collections, redeployed some of its dustcarts – cleaned out and painted a tasteful black – as hearses to collect the war dead.

Given the quite obvious disdain in which Dave holds the military, and the utter futility of the war in Afghanistan, where lives are being thrown away for absolutely no purpose – to say nothing of our hard-earned cash – he might consider following the example of the East End council.

Thus, for as long as Dave and his cronies continue to throw away lives for no purpose, he might as well do the honest thing and hire in a dustcart, instead of wasting money on expensive hearses that the public now will not be seeing. The symbolism would be entirely appropriate and serve merely to underline what our masters are doing with our money and soldiers' lives out in Afghanistan.

COMMENT THREAD

Losing the will to live

2011-06-28T12:59:00.002+01:00

Well, I watched the 13th Century Fox announcement in the Commons yesterday, and the whole of the subsequent debate. Then I read the 82-page report. But you can only take so much punishment before you lose the will to live, so I decided to sleep on it before writing it up.

Having further cogitated, I've come to the conclusion that I'm none the wiser for the travail. More seriously, it is well-evident that Lord Levene, his Defence Reform Steering Group, and thus 13th Century Fox, are not much wiser either.

Yes we agree that there are too many generals, and the number must be cut. But that's low-hanging fruit. We observed as much in November 2009 so it would hardly take a high-powered committee and 18 months to work that one out.

And yes, there appear to be some obvious and necessary reforms amongst the 53 separate recommendations. But even if it was acting purely by chance, you would expect that. And, of course, there is plenty of right-on guff, with the Group telling us that we need to create single, coherent Defence Infrastructure and Defence Business Services organisations, to ensure enabling services are delivered efficiently, effectively and professionally.

The trouble is that the moment you see words such as "coherent" and phrases such as: "to ensure enabling services are delivered efficiently, effectively and professionally", you know they're up to no good.

What one was looking for, though, was some sense that the Group really understood the problems they were looking at, and thus knew where to start the remediation. And here, centre stage is procurement, so that one looked especially for the views on this troubled issue.

What was needed was a clear statement that the failures here stem largely from the inability of ministers and senior military staff to define roles, to match equipment to the roles, then to devise acquisition plans and stick to them.

And here, the Group starts well enough, referring to the Bernard Gray review, where it was noted that successive attempts at reform have concentrated on acquisition delivery, rather than – as suggested – seeing procurement as a symptom rather than a cause of the problems in the Department’s decision making.

We go with that, but what are the problems? And here the whole damn thing falls apart. The Group is not into problem solving, but "lessons learned". Thus, they identify "conditions for success in transformations", producing a Janet & John list that comes straight out of the Common Purpose manual on how to bullshit the public.

Thus we get these headings: leadership: vision; engagement; communication; effective people; implementation; resourced; innovation (which "visibly encourages original and radical thinking, and leverages both independent expertise and internal knowledge"); honesty: "the programmes tone inspires confidence, enthusiasm and a 'sense of opportunity' while being realistic about cuts and challenges"; and benefits.

I will not trouble you further with this, for fear of making you physically sick, but that is a measure of the beast.

What one did not find, therefore, were any recommendations of lasting value. This is about shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic more efficiently, and getting more value from the band. The only merciful thing is that the report is only 82 pages long, as opposed to the 296 pages of the Gray report.

That, I suspect, will be the Group's only lasting achievement – reducing the amount of waste printed matter that goes in the bins.

COMMENT: MOD THREAD

A nosedive of morale

2011-06-18T13:03:00.001+01:00

Cameron's drive to reduce the size of the Armed Forces, even to the extent that he is forcing Service chiefs to call for redundancies, is undoubtedly marking the final stages in the decline of the UK as a political power. It would be a fool, however, who did not expect this to have a knock-on effect within the Services, so the news from Thomas Harding that morale is at "rock bottom" comes as absolutely no surprise.

He tells us that this, together with concerns that the Army is in a "permanent state of decline" has led to twice as many people applying for redundancy as expected. They include several future battalion leaders and two officers singled out as potential generals. Six brigadiers have volunteered for redundancy and 48 majors, with an average of 16 years experience each, have asked to go.

The important thing here though is that we are not just talking about the over-paid and over-privileged officer corps throwing a hissy fit. The Army is expected to lose a substantial number of senior NCOs, and has also been inundated with applications from corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants.

This we picked up independently, a little time ago, when we learned that the trigger for departure was a tour in Afghanistan. Once they had experience the shambles, hardship and danger of that theatre – with no obvious reason why they should – few are willing to repeat it. Now, so desperately short of junior NCOs are some units that soldiers only a few months out of training are being promoted.

Whatever the MoD and government propaganda might proclaim, we are fully aware that the official accounts are biased and incomplete, on top of which the Army is haunted by its institutional memory of failure in Iraq.

Cynicism has thus become a dominant sentiment and there is a massive sense of the futility of the Afghan operation, Furthermore, the failure of the Army to come to terms with its experience in that theatre has carried over into Afghanistan.

We are thus seeing an institution which has lost faith in itself, the result being dangerous haemorrhage, ending up with the ranks populated by children, as the older, more seasoned troops leave, commanded by a higher proportion of the inexperienced, the incompetent and disillusioned.

Military historians will undoubtedly be able to tell us things have been worse – and the inter-war period when disarmament was the vogue, must have been pretty dispiriting. Nevertheless, when the Army chiefs asks for 25 colonels to volunteer for redundancy and receives 52 applications, it must be agreed that the situation is dire.

One wonders, though, whether in the short to medium term the situation it recoverable, and whether indeed there is any serious political will to make any improvements. One cannot help but feel that the people masquerading as our leaders are content with the way things are developing, and will be most happy when our Army looks like the picture above.

COMMENT THREAD

End game

2011-06-04T01:11:00.000+01:00

We saw it coming in January 2006, but it goes back to November 1996 and the Bordeaux agreement on bilateral UK-French naval co-operation, in the dying days of the Major administration. Extended by Blair in 1998 in St Malo, we now have three prime ministers: Major ... Blair ... Cameron, all with the same agenda.

And now we move to the end game, the final surrender, as the Anglo-French force paves the way for a fully-fledged EU Navy.

Autonomous Mind also picks up the story. "All this has been planned and delivered, hidden in plain sight of the electorate and the media, yet even now many in the media are still unable or unwilling to connect the dots and explain to our population what our political class has done. They are sickening quislings to a man and a woman".

What more can one say?

COMMENT THREAD

The politics of denial

2011-05-22T09:05:00.001+01:00

The British formally ends its final military mission in Iraq today – a Navy training operation in the Gulf. Interesting how CNN marks the occasion with a Snatch Land Rover, while Hague says the mission has left Iraq "a better place".

In all probability, Iraq is indeed a better place. But Hague claims too much in taking the credit. The British expedition in southern Iraq was a failure, and only the combined efforts of the Iraqis and the US Forces salvaged something from the wreckage, but not before many people – and especially Iraqis – died unnecessarily.

Ironically, the Snatch Land Rover is the symbol of that failure, representing the inability of the military to adapt to circumstances, and handle a vicious but ultimately beatable insurgency. But to this day, neither the military nor the politicians have to grips with their failures. They are still in denial - a sure recipe for continued failure, of the nature we are currently experiencing in Afghanistan.

Interestingly, the Tories could have started with clean sheet, but they have also bought into the cover-up and are no more able to cope with acknowledging failure than their predecessors. As with so other issues, all we get is the closing of ranks. "Face" is more important to the establishment than success - and certainly more important than the lives of soldiers.

COMMENT THREAD

Shocked ... again!

2011-05-22T00:09:00.000+01:00

Coalition plans to pull out of Afghanistan are being hampered by theft and fraud totalling nearly $1bn, The Independent on Sunday is telling us. It adds that "hopes of a timely withdrawal of British troops from the region have been dealt a critical blow by revelations about massive bank frauds which have forced donors to suspend vital international aid".

In a country that is possibly even more corrupt than either India or Pakistan, and where it is known to all but the blind, deaf and the stupid (i.e., most of our politicians) that the élites of Afghanistan have been enriching themselves at the expense of international taxpayers, this really can come as no surprise.

And where the people of Afghanistan see daily the lack of progress (being unable to read the ISAF press releases), knowing full well that the bulk of the aid money is being ripped off, the Taliban are seen by many as the only hope for the beleaguered country. Any idea that we are going to walk away, bands playing, to leave a settled, stable, country, is pure fantasy.

When we leave, as leave we must and will shortly, the money spent will have been wasted, the dead soldiers and the broken bodies and minds of the survivors a testament to the egos and stupidities of successive politicians and military geniuses who thought they could waltz in and make a difference without doing the homework.

Collectively, they should hang their heads in shame. But they won't.

COMMENT THREAD

Idiots

2011-05-20T08:43:00.000+01:00

Incompetent defence chiefs cost British forces their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan by squandering nearly £1billion on armoured vehicles that have not been built.

This is the narrative being thrown up by The Daily Fail and others this morning, telling us the Ministry of Defence "wasted a shocking £718million on plans for thousands of properly-protected battlefield trucks which were then scrapped or delayed".

Look behind the headlines and you will see FRES – about which we have written a word or two. But the MoD/Army narrative is that the MoD purchased a fleet of mine-resistant vehicles - including Mastiffs and Ridgebacks - to stop troops being maimed and killed. These were bought as "urgent operational requirements' using Treasury cash. But because they were built specifically for Afghanistan, they are unsuitable for wider use".

In other words, we are being told that FRES would have been a better option – which is pure, distilled BS. The mine protected fleet was bought instead of FRES – in the face of stiff resistance from the Army. Had the Army been given its way, there would have been carnage.

But there is something more fundamental here. Apart from Korea, the Falklands and the first phases of the Iraqi war, every significant conflict in which the Army has been deployed has involved elements of irregular warfare, for which these mine protected vehicles were designed. But the Army hates this type of warfare, refuses to accept that this is the rule, rather than the exception, and hankers after the free-style, war of manoeuvre for which FRES is designed.

Classically, the Army is seeking to equip itself for the wars it would wish to fight, instead of the warfare it is most likely to meet - a triumph of hope over experience.

But FRES, as they say, is the narrative, and the MSM buys it hook line and sinker. The real story is here ... in my book, but we don't want anything like the truth sullying the minds of the public, so let's forget all about that. These people are idiots.

COMMENT THREAD

Opportunism?

2011-02-01T17:24:00.001Z

That diminishing band of us who celebrate having memories of slightly greater capacity than the proverbial goldfish in a bowl will recall what a big deal the Tories made out of the shortage of helicopters for our troops in Afghanistan – even though the need was vastly overstated.

Such was the political pressure, though, that the then Labour government allowed itself to be bounced into ordering a further 20 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters to augment operations – unwisely in my view.

How interesting it is, therefore, to learn from the left-leaning Daily Mirror that the self-same helicopters "promised to troops in Afghanistan" may be axed by the Tories. And if that is too partisan a source, then one should note that the Financial Times is also pointing out that there is a "question mark" over the order.

I said at the time that the Tories were playing politics and they were pushing the wrong debate, for the wrong reasons. So it turns out to be – a classic example of political opportunism.

In then becomes doubly interesting to see how quiet the media are being about this volte face, especially the gung-ho, Tory-supporting Sun, which thought nothing was too much for "Our Boys", as long as pointing this out embarrassed Labour.

When the account of the current Afghan campaign comes to be written, it might then be remarked how quick the media and the Tories were to make political capital out of the military problems in theatre, when it suited them, but how little they actually did care, and how quickly the Tories forgot their concerns once they were in what passes for power.

COMMENT THREAD

A Harrier replacement

2010-12-16T23:15:00.003Z

Much weeping and gnashing of teeth attends the premature retirement of the Harrier force. Those of us with longer memories, though, will recall that the original justification for the aircraft (in the ground attack role) was that its V/STOL capability allowed it to be deployed closer to the FEBA (Forward Edge of the Battle Area). The high sortie rate - attendant on the short transit time - thus compensated for the poor load-carrying capability and the limited range.

Latterly, the aircraft has been used to salve wounded pride in Afghanistan, where the vast preponderance of close air support has been provided by the Americans. Based at Kandahar, where facilities were fairly primitive, the Harrier was able to operate from the air base, in the space left by the Americans, when our heavier aircraft (such as the Tornado) could not, without considerable expenditure on infrastructure.

Nothing of this, however, makes up for the fact that the Harrier retains its limited load-carrying capability, and limited range. This, plus the fact that it is inordinately expensive to operate and highly manpower intensive, makes it a far from ideal aircraft.

On the other hand, the A-6 /Tucano B-2 option offers a better load/range/endurance combination than the Harrier. These aircraft are vastly cheaper to operate and, although not capable of vertical landing, they do have a significant short-field capability and can operate from unprepared strips. In many respects, therefore, this aircraft type could be a useful Harrier replacement.

March of the euroslime

2010-11-02T09:58:00.001Z

What is incredible is how blatant it all is, and how easily they lie through their teeth as they "insist" that this will not give the European Union a role in Britain's defence policy. Despite their denials, the great greasy-pole merchant Liam Fox - so ambitious he would sell his mother for a farthing if it bought preferment - has sold us out to the forces of European integration, cosying up to his euroslime master Cameron in the process.

A treaty creating a new joint Anglo-French rapid reaction force would serve both countries’ interests in a world "where resources are tight", he says, as his traitorous master is set to announce the creation of a new Combined Joint Expeditionary Force (CJEF) of around 6,500 troops from the two countries under a 50-year deal for closer military "co-operation".

It is expected to include units from the Parachute Regiment, the Royal Marines and Special Forces including the SAS, as well as their French counterparts. The CJEF, they say, is the centrepiece of a new Anglo-French military co-operation treaty being unveiled by Camerslime and TLOTK Sarkozy at a summit in London today.

Needless to say, this "new" Combined Joint Expeditionary Force is not new. It is simply a battle group, along the lines agreed in 2004 as the core part of the European Rapid Reaction Force. Under the guise of "economy", euroslime Cameron is selling out to the euroweenies, doing more for European integration in his first year of office than Blair did in thirteen.

Of course, the lame and the stupid are wittering on about this being "a bilateral, not a supranational endeavour," which is complete and total cant – a staggering insult to our intelligence.

But for all those dim little Tories, all this does is go to prove is that the only thing more stupid than a Tory politician is a supporter of the Tory party. As they trill away about this not being a repeat of Tony Blair's St Malo summit – which is exactly what it is – all you can hear is the sound of their brains gushing out of their backsides.

This is a continuation of the Maastricht Treaty agenda, as this briefing note makes clear. Agreed by the Tories under John Major, this set up the parameters for the development of a European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The process continued with the Franco-British meeting in Saint-Malo (France) in December 1998. That was when London and Paris agreed to jointly and actively work to make the European Union "able to carry out some security tasks on its own".

During the period 1999-2003, the EU set up relevant political-military structures to assess, decide, plan and execute military operations and now it is "moving ahead" to embark on a "second round". And that is what this is, the "second round" - building the ESDP, planning and organising new military "cooperation" and integration among EU member states. This is the Trojan Horse or, as the "colleagues" say, the catalyst.

With it, our military heritage is being sold down the river by the euroslime. These are black days. We have traitors in our midst, surrounded by fools who've woken up too late.

COMMENT THREAD

Sold out!

2010-10-29T11:45:00.001+01:00

In The Daily Telegraph we now read that French Rafales may be using the Royal Navy carriers. You did, of course, read it here first and then here. Amazingly, after the debacle of the "carriers with no planes", we are now told that, trying to bridge the “capability gap”, ministers have said the new carriers will be redesigned to have catapults to launch aircraft. That "will allow them to carry planes like the French Rafale". Oh, what a surprise.

The beans have been spilled by French defence minister Morin, who has told a "Euronaval conference" that: "I've asked our military command to consider the feasibility of stationing British aircraft on our aircraft carrier and vice versa." He added: "The idea is an exchange of capacity and an interdependence. It's a new approach."

Is it bollocks a new approach. That has been the plan all along ... do they think we are that stupid?

Anyhow, us poor little dimwits are told: "The British have decided to equip their aircraft carriers with catapults - we can have joint exercises, but also arrange to have a Rafale squadron make use of the British platform." The plan would give France "a permanent presence at sea" even when its single aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, is in dock for maintenance and cannot sail, Morin says.

And so we march on to the Euro-navy. Dave the slime presides over the work of his predecessors, Blair, Major and Heath. The Royal Navy is being sold out on the altar of European political integration. A more potent symbol of integration could hardly exist, and its all but in the bag.

RAFALE THREAD

Well, what a surprise

2010-10-20T13:36:00.000+01:00

The Daily Telegraph print edition runs a front-page story headed, "Armed Forces will have to seek French help to fight a war". The on-line version does not share the headline, but the key part of the content remains the same.

"At an Anglo-French summit next month," we are told, "Mr Cameron will discuss with President Nicolas Sarkozy a range of options for greater partnership, including the creation of 'high readiness joint formations' composed of British and French personnel." Mr Cameron, we further learn, "told MPs the summit would produce 'some very exciting steps forward'".

There is the real agenda. This a direct continuation of the post-Maastricht defence policy espoused by Major, and supported by Portillo in 1996, and continued by Bair in St. Malo and beyond. The 1996 agreement was even reported by The Independent at the time.

"Anglo-French military co-operation is thriving in a number of areas, despite the anti-European rhetoric of the Secretary of State for Defence, Michael Portillo," the paper said. "An Anglo- French nuclear committee is said to meet regularly and to have made considerable progress since President Chirac came to power last May, although both sides are secretive about the committee's agenda."

You can bet both sides are "secretive", and they still are. But this is not helped by the current newspapers failing to make the links between then and now. Reporters have no memory of previous events and the media has no institutional memory, and thus every event is reported in isolation, without reference to the previous, linked developments.

Thus, Cameron is able to talk about "a range of options", as he was in charge, and had thought about the possibilities himself, rather than having had the Foreign Officer deliver them to him as part of the ongoing plan. And that is how we are being sold out – small step, by small step, so slowly that the media doesn't notice and can't join up the dots.

The name of the game is "interdependence", with each member state of the EU being robbed of the capability for independent action, thus being forced to worth with and rely on other member states. Through such a mechanism is the process of political integration driven.

The real irony, though, is that if we were to dispense with the annual payments to the EU - £18 billion and rising, we would not have needed to curtail spending on the Navy in the first place. But, of course, these things must not be mentioned in polite company, where European integration is simply a figment of the imagination of those horrid, uncouth eurosceptics.

So, gradually, we move into the end game. The sell-out will soon be complete, happening under our very noses while the clever-dicks sleep on, leaving Mr Cameron and his euroweenies to succeed where Hitler and the Axis powers never could - the destruction of the Royal Navy as an independent force.

COMMENT THREAD

Heath in our time

2010-10-20T02:34:00.002+01:00

Well, not only is HMS Ark Royal to be scrapped but the Fleet Air Arm as well. In the meantime, the BBC has learned that "at least one" of the new carriers will be redesigned so that it can deploy normal fighter aircraft that do not need a Harrier-style vertical lift capability.

Dr Fox says that there would be "interoperability" so strike fighter aircraft from allies such as France could land on UK aircraft carriers, and vice versa.

So what have we here? No British aircraft, an Anglo-French agreement on joint carrier operation and now a carrier design change that allows for the operation of French aircraft on the British carrier. Where did you read this first?

And as more and more details leak out, you can see the game – the Armed Forces are being stripped of capability to the point that they can no longer operate independently, even within the context of an alliance. We will have to look to "allies" for operational components just so that we can field our forces.

Well, the US Armed Forces don't work that way, so we will have to look elsewhere. Where do we think Cammy and his euroweenie chums are looking? Why does the phrase "sold out" come to mind? But then, this has been on the cards for a long time, and we said this was going to happen in January 2006.

That it should happen now, under a (partially) Tory government is not a surprise. Historically, the Tories have always been keenest on European military "co-operation" and the die was cast when Portillo signed the co-operation deal in 1996. Euro-Navy here we come, with the European Carrier Group as the flagship operation.

We are now simply seeing the end came of a process that has been under development for decades, and which started with Heath and his merry men. Forget Thatcher (Blair and all the rest). Cameron is the true heir to Edward Heath. In the manner of Chamberlain and Munich, we now have "Heath in our time".

COMMENT THREAD

An evening with defence

2010-10-20T02:33:00.001+01:00

So it came to pass that the North went south to attend the great debate. There was a smaller than usual attendance for a Spectator debate, which is interesting in itself, given the high profile of the defence at the moment.

The motion, I think, was part of the problem ... that the armed forces should be scrapped and replaced with the Royal Marines. It was roundly defeated, and deservedly so, and I say that even though I was speaking for the motion.

I tried to turn the debate by arguing that the motion was a proxy for arguing for institutional change, and that the real need was to break away from thinking about our three services and introduce an Armed Forces ethos, task orientated rather that focused on what the services wanted.

The trouble is with these things though, is that the spectator does see more of the game. You sit there, blinded by the lights, in your little bubble of nerves, trying to marshal your thoughts and hoping you do not fluff you lines.

One point, I made was that the officer corps in the WWII Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe trained together and that the officers only specialised after being commissioned. But it was also the case that Albert Kesselring, in command of Luftflotte 2 during the Battle of Britain then went on to command OB South and mastermind the fighting withdrawal of the German land forces in Italy.

I am not sure the idea went down all that well, but I also went on to point out that the strategic bombing campaign conducted by the allies was fought by RAF bomber command on the one hand and the US Army Air Force on the other. And, of the two, arguably the USAAF was more innovative and effective.

The point from all that, and some other more recent examples, is that performance does not depend on the nature of the institution. But another from the war made that point. In Germany, anti-aircraft defences were part of the Luftwaffe. In Britain, they were part of the Army, but under the overall control of Fighter Command. In Germany, Paratroops were again part of the Luftwaffe. In Britain, they were part of the Army.

There are loads of other examples which, I think, demonstrate that it really does not matter which service you are in, as long as the function is well defined, and the people in it are properly trained and equipped. The job isn’t done better because it is done by any specific service. In the Korean War, the British air component was provided exclusively by the Fleet Air Arm, and so on.

Anyhow, it was entertaining enough, and the dinner afterwards more so. But it was Chatham House rules, so I cannot repeat what any one person said. Nevertheless, the discussion confirms my many impressions of certain high personages. Surprising accord on Afghanistan. There has been something of a learning curve and the original paradigms have been thrown out of the window. We are simply looking for a credible – or any – exit plan.

One really interesting point though was that there was lots of bitching about the cost of the csrriers and complaints about them being bought. I made my speech about the European Carrier Group, St Malo and the ERRF ... it was like I'd made a bad smell in the room. They couldn't change the subject fast enough.

I am never sure, therefore, whether these events are worth the time and nervous energy they take, but it does help to climb out of the ivory tower occasionally, and see how the other half live. It is not a pretty sight really, but the beef was actually rather good.

COMMENT THREAD

Savagely vindicated ... again

2010-10-10T12:50:00.002+01:00

I first wrote about it on 28 July 2004, marking it down as "another blunder of Eurofighter proportions".

This is the £16 billion FRES programme, which I have consistently opposed, writing over 100 pieces about it. Yet I was almost a lone voice, stacked up against an indifferent and ignorant media, with only Booker for support in the media, and the tenacious Ann Winterton in Parliament.

On the other side of the divide, its greatest supporter has been General Sir Richard Dannatt, with the wholehearted approval of the Defence Committee and the Tory defence team.

But now we learn that FRES is dead in the water. "It's a dead duck. It is the definition of everything that is wrong with the MoD's procurement process," says a senior Ministry of Defence source. Actually, this isn't a procurement issue - it is a definition problem - the Army simple couldn't get its act together and make a coherent case for its future needs.

Fortunately, the project has not gone so far down the acquisition path that it is incapable of being cancelled. And, although I say it myself – because no one else will – that is in no small measure due to the opposition of this blog. Such was its reach and its sister blog DOTR, that we had the then procurement minister coming onto our forum to plead the case, after I had written this.

This I remarked at the time was when the blogosphere came of age, when a blog was setting the agenda and forcing ministers to respond. We in turn responded with this - a case which was never satisfactorily countered. Few people know the effect that piece had on the defence establishment, and why. I do.

You can read much of the background in Ministry of Defeat, still the only book that gets near telling the story. It has a recent review here.

Yet it is the Gen Dannatt who is lauded as the great expert, doyen of The Daily Telegraph - the man who "knows". This is the man who would have lumbered us with that useless pile of junk called FRES, and its lifetime costs in excess of £60 billion. By contrast, this blog won't even get a look in, shunned by the great and the good for telling the inconvenient truths.

Even then, the media doesn't get it. That idiot political editor Patrick Hennessy, who writes the piece about FRES being ditched, states: "The decision will mean that the Army will be forced to fight in Afghanistan and in future conflicts with its existing fleet of ageing vehicles, some of which first entered service in the 1960s."

In his little Westminster bubble, the world passes him by. Has he not heard of the Mastiff, Ridgeback, Wolfhound, Ocelot? How you can be that ignorant and still be a journalist is one of those modern miracles. No wonder they think Dannatt is an expert.

COMMENT THREAD

Snatch to be replaced

2010-09-22T14:01:00.001+01:00

The BBC is trilling its little head off about the announcement that the decision to award the contract for the LPPV has gone to Force Protection Europe and Ricado, with their Ocelot. That is probably the right choice and it means that the last of the Snatch Land Rovers can now be replaced. However, while one can say it is exactly what the Army needed – that was back in 2003. It is now probably too little, too late.

Nevertheless. it will be heaps better than the Jackal and maybe some soldiers who would otherwise have left their legs and possibly their brains spattered over the Afghan countryside might survive intact. However, in the case of some officers, it would be hard to tell the difference if the latter event occurred, and for some generals it would be an improvement.

Of course, it would have been nice if we had had mine protected vehicles back in 2003, when we really did need them, instead of the Snatch Land Rover ... er ... except that we did (pic below). But the Army didn't want them and flogged them off at knock-down prices. It then did its level best to ensure that no more were bought - with the full support of the BBC - until the hapless Des Browne forced the issue and soldiers started finding out how nice it was to have two legs after all.

Now, of course, the Army has seen the light, seven years after it could have acted – which is about the sort of speed the Army is capable of working (in fact, slightly faster than average). But the Taliban now have seven years practice in blowing up British Army vehicles and will soon get the measure of this one. What we really need is more Buffaloes and some Huskies, which even the French are buying, and some concerted effort in using intelligence-based systems coupled with 24/7 UAV surveillance on target routes.

The trouble is that the idea of using detection systems, as well as detection vehicles in concert (much less designing and buying a Pookie replacement with GPR and environmental mapping software) is probably so far above the competence level of the typical brown job that we'll have to wait for the invasion of the Euro Army (where in some countries they still have an education system) to up the brain-cell count before we get any movement in that direction.

Instead, we'll have to make do with the Media's currently favourite talking head, Col Tootal, to tell us what for. He know's everything 'cos he's been there and ritten a book. So that's alright. Job sorted.

COMMENT THREAD

Sodden and limp

2010-09-21T09:06:00.003+01:00

In the aftermath of the British withdrawal from Sangin, we have considerable media comment, and a huge contrast of styles. Up front is the ponderous – some might say pompous - Max Hasting, in The Daily Mail. He says: "Blame the generals and politicians for this mess. But our soldiers can hold their heads up high."

Then we have the gung-ho Sun which blares: "Sangin: Our Boy's blood, their efforts, their victory." And just to make sure we get the message, it has that great strategist Andy McNab, who is now the "Sun Security Adviser". Continuing the joke, he tells us:

I AM fed up with armchair generals who say the handover of Sangin to US Forces is a British retreat. That is 100 per cent crap. We have moved out because at long last the 20,000 US 'boots on the ground' finally arrived.

The Scotsman has Clive Fairweather telling us that the handover is a sensible redeployment of our troops ... not a retreat. He then retreats behind a "premium" paywall, so we never get to see what he really thinks. And we care less.

In The Daily Telegraph we get some sensible pieces from Thomas Harding, but it is more reportage than analysis. And that is what is missing – decent analysis.

You couldn't call Hasting's piece "decent" analysis. His is lightweight extruded verbal material. You unroll it, tear it off by the yard and paste it in to fill the space. I'm getting rather bored with his pontificating.

I was mightily cheered, however, by an extract from Michael Foot's biography of Aneurin Bevan, who commented on the wartime coverage of military affairs – the Second World War, that is. "Immediately on the outbreak of war," he wrote, "England was given over to the mental level of the Boys' Own Paper and the Magnet". He continues:

The Childrens Hour has been extended to cover the whole of British broadcasting, and the editors of the national dailies use treacle instead of ink. If one can speak of a general mind in Britain at all just now, it is sodden and limp with the ceaseless drip of adolescent propaganda.

At least we can take some comfort in having been there before. I devoted a considerable amount of effort into evaluating the situation at Sangin in Defence of the Realm and was particularly proud of this and this.

But with a nation given over to a second childhood, still "sodden and limp with the ceaseless drip of adolescent propaganda," such grown-up analysis is a complete waste of time and energy. How much easier it is to cheer "Our Boys" to the rafters, and celebrate yet another victory.

COMMENT THREAD

Fluffheads Mk II

2010-09-20T15:14:00.002+01:00

The Taliban have taken out a Jackal, killing two soldiers. Far from being critical, however, The Sun acts as a free propaganda sheet for the MoD, calling in aid Major Chris Hunter, ex Army bomb disposal "expert".

The Jackal is so much better than its predecessor, the Snatch Land Rover, says Major Hunter, immediately demonstrating that, while he may be a bomb disposal expert, he certainly ain't a vehicle expert. The predecessor to the Jackal was the WIMIK Land Rover. The Snatch was supposed to be replaced by the Vector – another brilliant choice from those Army geniuses.

But hey, this is The Sun after all, so we get Hunter giving us a Janet and John lecture, telling us that, with combat vehicles there is always a trade-off:

You have to balance firepower, mobility and protection and the result is a compromise. When you increase the vehicle's capability in one area, you have to surrender it in another. More armour means less speed and less manoeuvrability.

As you can see, 50 years and more of expertise on vehicle mine protection, the theory and practice, is ignored. But what do you expect of a British Army Major?

Anyhow, this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that very little you read in the newspapers can be trusted. Feast your eyes on the above, as the Guardian Air Correspondent tells us that the "new" Heinkel 113 is inferior to the Spitfire and Hurricane.

And indeed it is, for one very simple reason – it does not exist. It is a spoof, a propaganda stunt pulled by the Germans. Soon enough though, we had RAF pilots swearing that they had shot down He 113s, with "kills" studiously recorded by intelligence officers and entered in the official record.

Now, in the great tradition of the wartime Guardian, we have David Willetts, Defence Correspondent of The Sun, fronting a piece telling us what a brilliant truck the Jackal is. You can always rely on The Sun - they will tell you how it really is.

COMMENT THREAD

Another great victory

2010-09-20T11:18:00.003+01:00

Most of the papers carry the "news " today, that British forces have scored yet another great victory in the global war on terrorism, handing over the now pacified town of Sangin to the grateful forces of his excellency president Karzai, who will now extend his kindly rule over the friendly and prosperous inhabitants of this bustling market town.

This victory follows in the great tradition of recent campaigning in Afghanistan, where British forces can now add Sangin to the growing list of towns and settlements pacified, which include Now Zad, Musa Qala and Kajaki, and where the US forces can only stand back and admire the sheer skill, dedication and fortitude of the UK military and its leaders.

The template for this success, however, was undoubtedly forged in recent times by the experience in Iraq, where the British military brought us the stunning success of the al Amarah campaign, followed by its storming success in Basra, which has earned the undying gratitude of the Iraqi people – those that survived the experience.

But for those who think such successes are recent, we need to look back 70 years where, this weekend we were able to celebrate another great victory where the RAF so successfully beat off the German air force that the citizens of London and elsewhere in the UK only had to endure another eight months of bombing and a few tens of thousands dead and injured – plus hundreds of thousands of homes and properties destroyed - as the Luftwaffe roamed almost without challenge in the barely-defended night-time skies.

And so the lessons of the past transfer to the future. Says Sir Stephen Dalton, the current Chief of Air Staff, "winning the Battle of Britain was vital to the overall outcome of the war ... Unless we had control of the skies over Britain we could not build up the forces ready to liberate Europe later on."

"That is entirely relevant today," he adds. "Without the freedom of the skies in Afghanistan there would need to be 10 times the number of soldiers and marines on the ground to achieve the same effect." And as with the Luftwaffe of the past, we only have to count the wrecks of the Taliban air force to know how true this is.

We are so lucky that we have such wise and foresighted leaders who will guide us on the path to yet more and better glorious victories in the mould of Sangin. And the Afghanis simply don't realise how lucky they are that we happened along at just the right time to save them and their beautiful country.

COMMENT THREAD

Didn't we do well!

2010-09-15T14:15:00.000+01:00

The Heritage Industry is in full spate today, celebrating "Battle of Britain day", and in particular the 70th anniversary of the battle.

As always – seen from the picture above – the politicians are getting in on the act (give them an "act" and they'll climb into it, with not a scintilla of shame), but in so doing they perpetrate a pernicious myth that hands credit for what actually amounts to a famous victory to a self-serving élite, and completely distorts an important part of our history.

At the core of all this, of course is the myth of the "Battle of Britain", with the "battle" capitalised. At the time, it did not exist, was not recognised as such and only came formally into being in April 1941 when the Air Ministry published a pamphlet with that title. Even then, the start point was 8 August and it was not until later that it was revised to the arbitrary date of 10 July.

The "self-serving élite" at the time was, of course, RAF Fighter Command – not "the few", who were just the expendable pilots, the cannon fodder, but the institution. At that time it was locked in mortal combat with the real enemy, Bomber Command. It was threatening to achieve what the Luftwaffe had failed to do, the abolition of Fighter Command.

It was the "invention" of the Battle of Britain which made this a political impossibility, and that involved branding a very limited part of the overall battle, and vesting the ownership with Fighter Command. Thus pilots who flew with Bomber or Coastal Commands during the period chosen do not qualify for membership of the "few" because the "brand" is exclusive to Fighter Command.

The more important issue, though, is that the real Battle of Britain lasted much longer than the very short period claimed by Fighter Command. Furthermore, it actually comprised three phases. The first started on the first day of the war – the "blockade" phase - which continued through until 1942 when we finally achieved a victory.

The second phase, running contiguously, is the classic "air superiority" phase, but it actually lasts from about 8 August until 6 September 1940, the next day being the day the Luftwaffe bombs the Port of London and the start of phase 3. In the general hagiographies of the battle, bombing London is seen as the great mistake by Hitler, and the one that saved the RAF and therefore Britain. Without German air superiority, the threatened invasion could not go ahead.

But actually, the mistake was going for the RAF in the first place. This perhaps reflected the hubris of the moment and the half-formed but totally unrealistic plan for an invasion of Britain, which was never a practical proposition. Thus, while the battle for air superiority raged, wiser heads prevailed, affirming that the invasion was a non-starter. A more certain way of taking Britain out of the war - it was thought - was to attack the people in the cities.

At this time, the prevailing theory of air warfare was that nations could be brought down by strategic bombing, the main effect being to erode public morale to such a great extent that that functioning of the cities would collapse and the governments would be forced to sue for peace.

Hitler and those around him reasoned that Britain – and the British Empire – was a corrupt, decadent, class-ridden society on the verge of collapse. It only needed a small push (in the form of the Blitz) to make that happen. In fact, he was wrong – but not far wrong. British society was torn by huge stresses and, under the weight of the bombing and the blockade, it very nearly did collapse. It was a very close-run thing, far closer than people want to admit.

The reason Britain did not collapse was, in small part due to the PR genius of Winston Churchill. But in the main part it was due to the perseverance and endurance of all those organisations which kept the fabric of society functioning, from the civil service, local authorities, the fire services, civil defence, hospitals, the nursing service, the Womens' Volunteer Service, and many, many more – plus, of course, the people themselves.

What is so often called the Blitz was the main part of the Battle of Britain - it was phase 3. It was the battle for the hearts and minds of the British nation, fought by the entire British nation, which endured until May 1941. It was then that Hitler turned his attention eastwards and withdrew the bulk of his forces in preparation for the invasion of Russia. The phase two of the battle was an irrelevance, a strategic impasse. The "few" and their counterparts in the Luftwaffe were fighting a meaningless battle.

Seen in this context, the Great Churchillian Soundbite – "never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few" is exactly the opposite of reality. Given that those most at risk were the privileged élites, it would be far more accurate to say that never had so few owed so much to so many – a debt they were never to repay.

That is not in any way to disparage the actions of the fighter pilots, or to take anything from their raw courage and heroism. It is simply to put their endeavour in perspective. The battle as a whole, the real battle of Britain, was a battle fought and won by the people – the many. In truth, it was won more in spite of, rather than because of the actions of the government.

It was our battle, our victory. And didn't we do well!

COMMENT: Battle of Britain thread

The story so far

2010-08-12T14:16:00.001+01:00

With the new parliament now in place, I am no longer earning most of my living as a parliamentary researcher and must find new sources of income. But I have been fortunate in gaining a commission from my publisher to write a new history of the Battle of Britain, and am planning other ventures based on this project ... hence the focus also on The Tales of Glory blog and the fall-off in writing on this blog.

The fall-off will only be temporary. It is "silly season" and there is a certain ennui in the air, so I am taking the opportunity to get ahead of the game in what will be a long and difficult project. At this point, I must repeat my appreciation for all those who have commented on the forum – everything is read and stored, and there is some incredibly useful stuff there.

Crucially, at the moment, I am working on the air-sea rescue issue, and have made significant advances. And one of the sources to which I was directed to on the forum was this:

One problem area which did arise was the Air Ministry's fault, and a lot of people got killed as a result. I refer to the non-existent air-sea rescue service; the system should have had one but it didn't. ... [A] lot of pilots were killed, either through shock or burns or just being dragged away by their parachutes and drowned, never to be seen again through lack of co-ordination.

Later in the war, in 1941, we formed the Air Sea Rescue (ASR) Service, and if anybody came down there was somebody on the spot almost before they had landed in the sea. But this didn't happen in 1940, and this is a black mark which the system had to endure right the way through the battle.

These are the thoughts of Derek Wood (or some of them), co-author of the seminal text on the Battle of Britain, The Narrow Margin, articulated at a symposium in Bracknall in 1990, sponsored jointly by the RAF Historical Society and the RAF Staff College Bracknall.

What I now have to do is set out the case for why the failure to provide an adequate (or any) ASR Service is still relevant 70 years later. And the most obvious point is that similar failures are happening in the here and now in Afghanistan, were happening five years earlier in Iraq and most certainly have been happening earlier elsewhere.

My feeling is that, had even the background of what I already know about the 1940s failures been part of the public domain when I started arguing in 2006 for the replacement of Snatch Land Rovers, it would have been much easier to get the message across that the military was, through neglect and other diverse reasons, allowing their troops to be killed.

What makes the Battle of Britain experience so valuable are the many different facets which put the current experience in context. Firstly, we see established a failure of the "system" to take measures to safeguard the safety and lives of military personnel, and not just any personnel – those who were the key to the whole battle and from which shortage the battle could have been lost.

This demonstrates that, even when the whole campaign and even – as is asserted to be the case here – the whole nation depends on preserving the lives of a few men, the "system" failed to step up to the plate. And if it could do it then, it most certainly could do it in the context of operations where the survival of the nation was not at stake.

Secondly, we see that it is a "system", not a political failure. Although the problems were known at high level within the RAF – and therefore within the Air Ministry – not one of the critics even begins to suggest that prime minister Winston Churchill might have been responsible, or bore any responsibility at all for the resultant deaths. I am still doing the arithmetic but, over the whole period the system failed, we are talking thousands rather than hundreds of deaths.

The point here, of course, is the contrast with modern times, where the prime minister Gordon Brown has been blamed for equipment failures and the military high command effectively absolved from any responsibility – by the popular press, at least.

Thirdly, we see the effect of censorship, secrecy and lack of scrutiny. The combination ensured that, even when the problems were known, very little timely action was taken other than, to ensure the guilty persons were not censured, an extensive, multi-layered cover-up was embarked upon, which survives to this day.

So pervasive is this that Wood believes that Dowding managed to "pinch" twelve Lysanders and base them around the coast so that they could drop dinghies to anybody they could find. But, while this is supposed to have happened in the July 1940, it seems more likely that the aircraft were available from late September only, and in smaller numbers.

But, what is also fascinating is that the use of amphibious aircraft in the form of the Walrus (pictured above) was proven on a small scale during the months of July and August 1940, the lessons were not applied until late 1941 and amphibians were not fully integrated into the system until 1942 – when the Germans had been using dedicated seaplanes for ASR since 1935.

The story is far too long to tell in the framework of one post, and although I have already told some of it, there still much more to research. But I will build the story gradually on the other blog and keep you appraised of developments as they materialise.

Perversely - but rather predictably - some of the most useful starting points for learning about the inadequacies of the system come not British sources, but from New Zealand and the United States. This report here, for instance, gives a good overview. Originally "confidential", it has now been declassified, and even the fairly anodyne language makes it clear how hugely inadequate the system was.

What is so important though is that the British military establishment went to quite considerable pains to conceal its neglect and paint an entirely false picture of what was actually provided and its effectiveness. It really does tell us something about an establishment which is keen to applaud the exploits of "the few" for its own purposes, while allowing airmen to die needlessly in their hundreds and thousands.

Anyhow, I'll get back to near normal on this blog shortly, and thanks for bearing with me.

Comment: Battle of Britain thread

Cannon fodder

2010-07-17T12:22:00.004+01:00

Another two Brits have been killed in Helmand. One was a Royal Marine and the other was a trooper from the Royal Dragoon Guards.

The Marine was on foot patrol in the Sangin district, while the Trooper was a member of the Brigade Reconnaissance Force, part of a dismounted patrol that was providing security to enable new roads and security bases to be constructed to the north-east of Gereshk. Both succumbed to IEDs.

This brings total British military deaths in Afghanistan to 320, less than a month after the three-century milestone had been reached. That puts the current annual death rate at close to 280 and makes it highly probable that the figure of 400 will be reached before the end of the year – unless there in a dramatic change in operational tempo.

In due course, there will be another street exhibition in Wooton Basset, and we are not alone in wondering whether the displays here are getting out of hand. What happened, for instance, to quiet dignity and the famous British "stiff upper lip"?

Moreover, while it is always tragic to see lives cut short, the campaign in Afghanistan has been going on long enough for soldiers to know what they are letting themselves in for. They either joined the armed forces in that knowledge or have not sought to remove themselves from harm's way.

Either way, the Army and the top brass do not seem to be mightily concerned about the losses, otherwise they might be doing something to prevent them, instead of indulging in back-covering propaganda. One does wish, therefore, that the Army spokesman would learn some new lines to go on the press releases when fatalities are announced.

Of the latest casualty, "... tragically he was struck by an explosion," says Lt-Col James Carr-Smith. "His courage, sacrifice and selfless commitment will never be forgotten." But of course it will. If he has any next of kin in Army quarters, the papers for eviction are already being prepared. The pay termination notice applied before even the body was cool.

We need to be a little bit more honest here, and call these men what they are – cannon fodder. Whatever their own personal delusions, they are only dying to cover the backs of Mr Cameron and Mr Fox, while they work out a suitable face-saving formula to cover their political embarrassment at announcing a defeat. That honesty might focus a few minds and get us out a little faster.

The pic shows soldiers en route to Afghanistan on the last roulement, in the belly of a C-17. More than three times the number visible will have returned in coffins by the end of the year. At least they get a little more space on the way back, and a car to meet them at the airport.

COMMENT THREAD

Beyond demonstrable failure

2010-07-13T08:32:00.000+01:00

"Renegade Afghan soldier kills three British troops." That's the headline in The Guardian with similar replicated elsewhere and more detail here.

Two (or four, according to some reports) more were injured during what is termed a "joint patrol" with local forces in southern Helmand, part of the mentoring process which is supposed to be improving the capabilities of the Afghan National Army (ANA) so that it can take over duties from ISAF.

This is not the first time we have seen such an incident. In November last, a rogue Afghan policeman killed five British troops. In December, an Afghan soldier also shot dead one US soldier and wounded two Italian troops at a base in Badghis.

Sadly, over the weekend I was discussing the process with a very senior member of the previous administration, observing in my own inimitable style that: "The mentoring scheme is crap, always was crap, always will be crap ... a very expensive and stupid waste of money ... and by now a demonstrable failure."

"Consistently," I wrote, "we turn our faces away from experience, from tried and tested systems that have a track record of working, to embrace something with a poor record of success. We then pursue it well beyond the point where it has become a demonstrable failure ... and express surprise that it does not work."

This was written before the piece in the Independent on Sunday by Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady. This revealed that the strategic plan of creating an Afghan security force to replace US and British troops is in serious disarray with local forces a fraction of their reported size, infiltrated by the Taliban at senior levels, and plagued by corruption and drug addiction.

Rather than be negative (which I am not when talking to people who are prepared to listen), I had observed that, in nuts and bolts terms, the interesting thing is that to pacify the plains tribes, you often had to use hill tribesmen. This was in the days of the Raj. Conversely, it was almost impossible to get plains tribesmen to go up into the hills and fight effectively.

The trouble is, I then noted, that we have cut ourselves off from the hill tribes. They are now in Pakistan ... except that they come of the hills raiding and looking for work. But it is rather remarkable that we are prepared to hire Nepalese and use them but not raise native regiments, drawing them down from the hills with bribes and offers of work.

In fact, one of my many earlier suggestions had been precisely that we should raise native regiments, officered by the British, but as part of the British Army, not the ANA, equipped by us, with British NCOs, and paid by us. Once knocked into shape, we could then hand them over to the Afghan government.

The native levy system was one which helped us conquer the Empire, the regiments so formed then going on to form the core of the post-colonial forces. And the best examples currently are the Pakistani and Indian Armies, living testament to our past military skills.

But the point has been made. Consistently, we turn our faces away from experience, from tried and tested systems that have a track record of working, to embrace something with a poor record of success. We then pursue it well beyond the point where it has become a demonstrable failure ... and express surprise that it does not work.

The only thing we seem to be able to excel in these days is consistency.

COMMENT THREAD

Even stupid people deserve better

2010-07-10T15:30:00.000+01:00

"We have this old adage," says Captain Anthony Harris of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (pictured): "70% skills and drills, 20% equipment, 10% luck". He goes on to say, "Unfortunately that's quite a large percentage for luck. You can overplay blame. We just happened to take the patrol on that path on that day."

This is after the man has been blown up in Helmand while riding in the commander's seat in a Jackal – as recorded by The Guardian. But the point is that it isn't an "old adage" – it is the sort of crap they are taught in soldier school by people who should know better.

What is more, some officers seem to believe what they are told, without complaint – this one still believing it after the trauma of amputation. That's why they get blown up in the first place, and keep getting blown up - yet they keep repeating the mantras ... skills 'n' drills, skills 'n' drills, skills 'n' drills ... BAMMMMMMMMM!

Compare and contrast with this - Lt-Col Roly Walker's experience of getting blown up. He is riding in a Mastiff and survives uninjured. "I always thought it was a case of 'when' not 'if' we drove over an IED," he says afterwards.

No doubt, Col Walker has his own "old adage": "100% equipment", as long as it's called a Mastiff. If you want to live, fly Mastiff. The problem is that, after the event, even after they have been blown up, some of our less intellectual people are still not putting two and two together: "I am sat over the wheel," Harris says. "The blast goes off underneath the wheel, the shockwave goes through the metal ...". Doh!

You do wonder what it takes to get the message through when, as here in September 2007, we have the Jackal being paraded, alongside Gen Dannatt telling us: "the mounting death toll in the country should not overshadow the success forces were having on the ground." The troops, he then said, "are winning the tactical battle".

Well, three years later, they're still winning the tactical battle, the ones that are still alive and in one piece - and Dannatt is collecting his pension. But his troops, after winning that tactical battle (again and again and again ...), are also pulling out of Sangin with more than 100 dead, mostly to IEDs, with three times that number very badly injured.

And that's why the MoD under the new Cleggeron adminstration are spending £45 million on another 140 Jackals. That's so we can have another batch of young men (and the occasional women) to sit over the wheels of these insane vehicles - and they too can lose their legs, or even their lives. But hey! Skills 'n' drills, skills 'n' drills ... keep taking the mantras. These prosthetics are really good when you get used to them.

But you do also wonder why newspapers, instead of doing soft-focus, human interest stories, don't point out that so many of these deaths and injuries are entirely unnecessary, brought about by enhanced stupidity, bolstered by bad tactics, misleading training, blind faith - and duff equipment.

Even stupid people and Army officers (where there is a difference) deserve better than that.

COMMENT THREAD

You can't say it's a victory

2010-07-08T10:40:00.008+01:00

The British withdrawal from Sangin was formally announced yesterday by defence secretary Liam Fox to parliament. The date set for their departure is October. In the meantime, the theatre reserve battalion from Cyprus is to be deployed in the district, responsibility for which is to be handed to US forces.

This is the first major contribution by the Cleggeron administration to the conflict in Afghanistan, and one which is being interpreted as a major turning point which Kim Sengupta, writing in The Indpendent thinks makes it now America's war.

In some quarters, this move is being regarded as a defeat. The view of Col Richard Kemp, writing for Channel 4 News is that the Taliban would certainly attempt to present it as a defeat. Parallels are being drawn with our humiliating withdrawal from Basra, although the Americans reject the comparison.

Perhaps it has more in common with the retreat from al Aamarah, where an ill-equipped Army abandoned a city torn by tribal strife, not fully understanding the dynamics in which they had become involved. Certainly, Richard Norton-Taylor, in The Guardian, remarks that British intelligence had been unable to get a grip on the tribal structure in the area, making it hard to cut deals with the key players and therefore protect UK forces.

This is unsurprising as the tribal mix is unusually complex even for Afghanistan, and further complicated by the presence of the Alakozai tribe and the long-standing feud with Ishaqzai, plus the ever-present Kuchi, who remain a poorly recognised but important component of the insurgency.

Predictably, Richard Dannatt, in his new role as all-purpose media renta-mouth, is also on the case. And it says something of the media that they should continue to lionise a retired commander who has probably contributed more to our tactical if not strategic defeat in Afghanistan than any other man.

By his wilful failure to recognise and deal with the IED threat in a timely fashion, by his sloth in ensuring that sufficient of the right type of UAVs and other surveillance assets were made available in theatre - to say nothing of the helicopters - and particularly by his early misreading of the tactical situation and his espousal of FRES as a suitable weapons system, he ensured that our troops were ill-prepared to counter the threats to which they were exposed.

Nevertheless, the former CGS argues in The Daily Telegraph that since the USMC, now in considerable strength, has assumed operational responsibility for northern Helmand, it makes no sense to have a lone British battlegroup in the middle of the US area. Redeployment is an entirely logical move.

Despite this, he says, some will present the change as the Americans bailing out the Brits and some will choose to see it as the start of a wider British withdrawal.

He too sees the Taliban attempting to claim the move as a tactical victory. And, rather forgetting that he is no longer in the Army, where he can order people around, he states: "Those views cannot be suppressed in a liberal democracy such as ours, but they should not be allowed to gain credibility or traction. It is more important that the move be seen for the sensible development of the campaign that it is."

Whatever Dannatt might declare, there is a sense of defeat. With a multi-national force where contingents from different countries are used to operating side-by-side, there is no overwhelming reason why the British Army cannot work within a US zone. But it has clearly reached a limit to how many men it can feed into the mincer of Sangin, which it has long failed to understand and has had no idea how to deal with it.

Of course, there are those in addition to Dannatt who will seek to defend British performance, especially those who have had the dubious benefit of "being there". But – as we have pointed out here, such campaigns are not won or lost on the ground, but in the offices and minds of strategic commanders and their advisors. And it has long been evident that they have lost the plot.

Patrick Cockburn, in The Independent, argues that British troops were never geared up to make a lasting difference. There were never quite enough British troops to gain permanent control of Sangin, and the Taliban obviously sensed the vulnerability of British troops spread too thinly. Roadside bombs, he writes, could inflict a toll which was difficult to justify in terms of bringing an end to the war.

He is not the only one to argue that we never had enough troops, but we disagree. In just one one example (and there were many more), we showed that the lack of imagination and ponderous tactics led to excessive demands for manpower. Much could have been done, more effectively, with far less.

And nor can anyone assert that we are being wise after the event. We have been nothing if not consistent in our criticism of the lacklustre tactics, the inadequate equipment and the limited strategic vision. You cannot defeat an insurgency in a land of a thousand walls.

Nevertheless, this is not a strategic defeat in the mould of Iraq, where British forces scuttled out of the field of fire, leaving unprepared and ill-equipped indigenous security forces to face the insurgency. This time, the US forces have learnt their lesson.

While even now the British are still talking up their expertise in counterinsurgency, based on their Northern Ireland experience, they are regarded as unreliable, their experience irrelevant (not that they are actually implementing the lessons). They have thus insisted on an orderly hand-over rather than allow a moonlight flit and are now - as always - to do the heavy lifting.

Nor is the military getting any support from the population. Ben Farmer in The Daily Telegraph interviews Haji Akhatar Mohammad, from Bostan Zoi village near Sangin.

He says: "The British had been there for a long time. They were not helpful and there was no good result from them. They didn't understand the people and there was too much fighting." Now, adds the 45-year-old elder, "People are happy the British are moving."

Neither does The Guardian offer any comfort. Sangin's residents, it says, have criticised the planned withdrawal, complaining that four years of fighting have failed to bring peace or development. "The British have failed," says Haji Fazlul Haq, a former town governor. "They could not bring security to the town and that is why they are handing it to the Americans."

This " blunt assessment" says the paper, was shared by other residents who expressed greater confidence in US forces due to take control in November. "The Americans fight harder. I think the Taliban will be afraid of this change of command," said Haji Abdul Wahab, acting director of the peace commission of Helmand, a government body that promotes reconciliation.

Despite this, our military have learned something from Iraq: minor embarrassments like failure can easily be dealt with by removing the word "defeat" from the military vocabulary. They simply substitute words like "redeployment", "reorganisation", "force realignment" or "a sensible redistribution of manpower". This latter phrasing was how 13th Century Fox justified it, having learnt well the art of spin from the Labour government that previously he was so quick to deride

The establishment line, being touted by the BBC is that "the changes being unveiled will improve the effectiveness of the overall military effort." They won't, of course – not without a significant change in strategy and tactics. The US tactics are probably marginally better, but still not good enough and their strategic appreciation is probably as lamentable as that of their British counterparts.

The only significant difference, therefore, is that the US forces are better able to weather the running attrition. With more men in theatre, the number of body bags is not (yet) quite so critical.

That aside, however much British politicians and the military care to dress it up, even Con Coughlin admits it still doesn't look good. The mockery has already started and, if they do manage to avoid the taint of defeat, the military sure as hell cannot claim that this has been a victory.

COMMENT THREAD

A modern-day barbarity

2010-06-28T12:17:00.000+01:00

A bomb disposal expert was killed in a gunfight with insurgents yesterday, The Guardian tells us, using the MoD as it source.

The solider from 101 Engineer Regiment (EOD), was attached to the joint force explosive ordnance disposal group, part of the counter improvised explosive device (IED) task force. He was "... part of an EOD team that was extracting from an incident when he was killed by small arms fire," said Lieutenant Colonel James Carr-Smith, a spokesman for Task Force Helmand.

"He died seeking to rid Helmand of IEDs such that local Afghans could move freely throughout the province. He will be greatly missed and his actions will not be forgotten. We will remember him," adds Carr-Smith.

But fine words butter no parsnips, as the saying goes. There are occasions when EODs must work out in the open, and this does put them at risk. However, as long as there is vehicle access to the site of a suspected IED, then there is no need whatsoever for a soldier to expose himself to fire.

In the first instance, there is the Husky set, for detecting IEDs and for detonating pressure-pad initiated devices. Mine rollers and armoured bulldozers also have their place. Then there is the Buffalo armoured vehicle, which can be used to investigate suspect devices. There are also tracked robots which can be used for further investigation – these can be controlled from the safety of a Mastiff protected vehicle.

However, in this man's Army, great value is placed on the ability of the EOD to neutralise and then dismantle IEDs, for the forensic evidence that it yields and thus the assistance it gives in tracking and arresting bomb-makers. For that reason, it is held, EOD must expose themselves to danger – for the greater good.

That argument would stand up if the policy led to a reduction in the number of bomb-makers and the number of IEDs placed. In fact, despite four or maybe five EODs being killed (perhaps more), plus an unknown number of soldiers killed while using hand-held metal detectors, IED incidents are at a record level.

Further, there are different and better ways of gaining intelligence to thwart the bomb makers, such as automatic change detection, or even direct UAV observation, tracing bomb-layers back to their bases – plus more subtle techniques.

Two years ago, we were asking how many more times must men be pitted against bombs, when there are machines which can be used in place of flesh and blood. In fact, we have been pointing this out ever since 2005.

Sending men against bombs is the equivalent of the First World War practice of having men in orderly lines walk into the muzzles of machine guns, instead of using tanks. In this modern age, we find it appalling that the military could even consider such barbarity – so why is it acceptable for the modern-day military to do what amounts to the same thing?

We need to forget the fine words – and bring these people back home alive.

COMMENT THREAD

They do not compute

2010-06-28T00:02:00.000+01:00

If one had to rank British media coverage of the Afghan conflict, my winner would almost certainly be The Independent - not that I agree with much of it, but at least they seem to be trying to offer a coherent picture (in so far as that is possible).

A significant contribution to that picture is a report today which tells us that Gen McChrystal had issued a "devastatingly critical assessment" of the war against a "resilient and growing insurgency" just days before being forced out.

I can't quite go with the paper's interpretation of this – it seems to believe that this assessment contributed to Obama's determination to fire the General, hence the strap-line attached to the piece by Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady, which declares: "President Obama lost patience with Runaway General's failed strategy".

Anyhow, the thrust of the story is of some significance, however you decide to interpret it. Using confidential military documents, we are told, McChrystal had briefed NATO defence ministers earlier this month and warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months. He raised "serious concerns" over levels of security, violence and corruption within the Afghan administration.

His "campaign overview" warned that only a fraction of the areas key to long-term success were "secure", governed with "full authority", or enjoying "sustainable growth". And there was a critical shortage of "essential" military trainers needed to build up Afghan forces – of which only a fraction were classed as "effective".

McChrystal had pointed to an "ineffective or discredited" Afghan government and a failure by Pakistan "to curb insurgent support" as "critical risks" to success. "Waning" political support and a "divergence of coalition expectations and campaign timelines" were among the key challenges faced. Only five areas out of 116 assessed were classed as "secure" – the rest suffering various degrees of insecurity and more than 40 described as "dangerous" or "unsecure".

Just five areas out of 122 were classed as being under the "full authority" of the government – with governance rated as non-existent, dysfunctional or unproductive in 89 of the areas. Seven areas out of 120 rated for development were showing sustainable growth. In 48 areas, growth was either stalled or the population was at risk. Less than a third of the military and only 12 percent of police forces were rated as "effective".

Afghan people "believe that development is too slow" and many "still generally mistrust Afghan police forces". Security was "unsatisfactory" and efforts to build up the Afghan security forces were "at risk", with "capability hampered by shortages in NCOs and officers, corruption and low literacy levels".

The problem with the briefing, apparently, was its candour. The general was judged to be "off message", creating an "uncompromising obstacle" to an "early, face-saving exit" and Obama's plan "to bring troops home in time to give him a shot at a second term."

A senior Whitehall official thus says that McChrystal's departure is a sign of politicians "taking charge of this war", from which we might adduce that there is to be a structured attempt to deceive the public into believing that a victory is being secured in Afghanistan and that we will shortly be able to withdraw troops from the theatre, with honour.

The problem I have with this analysis is that in the recent past – i.e., in Iraq – the military had been only to keen to representing defeat as victory. The indications are that they would do it again with Afghanistan. In that light, what is being said does not make obvious sense. The politicians should not need to worry. When told to depart, the military will pack up its tent, declare victory and go home with the bands playing.

Perversely, though, it seems that McChrystal – he who had been so confident of military victory - had been urging Washington to "start the political track as soon as possible", a process which would require the politicians to take the lead (and the responsibility) in talking to the Taliban and other parties.

In other words, McChrystal could have come to terms with the probability – if not certainty – that we are losing, and wanted to dump the problem on the politicians, which is exactly the reason why I thought he had engineered his own dismissal.

Petraeus, on the other hand, is supposed to be arguing "that we need to get the upper hand militarily and regain the military initiative, and then negotiate from a position of strength". Sources are saying that it would take time to recover from McChrystal's loss, "particularly if Petraeus just ploughs on with trying to get the upper hand militarily".

This could be reflecting another, as yet unexplored possibility that there is a schism within the military, with genuine differences of opinion as to whether the conflict is winnable – and over what timescale.

Such complexities get even murkier – or even more complex, if you prefer – when you read Patrick Cockburn. A seasoned, if not veteran war reporter, Cockburn got it completely wrong in southern Iraq during the British occupation – he was too focused on the US occupation. But he was worth listening to on American actions (although he wasn't exactly an objective observer).

Cockburn would have it that Petraeus is taking command in Afghanistan "to stage-manage a war that the US has decided it cannot win militarily, but from which it cannot withdraw without damaging loss of face."

Now, human nature being what it is, there is never judged so fine and perceptive a commentator as the one who articulates exactly what you personally believe to be the case. And that is so close to my "take" that it is all I can do not to remark on what a fine, perceptive fellow Cockburn has become.

But, if that is what Petraeus is in position to do, what was the real problem with McChrystal? Did he, unlike Petraeus, see that the public was not going to believe the victory bullshit a second time round and thus decide that, if someone was going to get blamed, it wasn't going to be the military? And if McChrystal had decided he couldn't pull it off, what makes Petraeus think he can?

One way or another, it seems, we are no way near getting to the bottom of this affair, even less so with Call me Dave twittering away about having "achieved results", when McChrystal is saying that things are going down the pan.

Then we have Gen Richards saying (apparently spontaneously – and you can believe that if you like) that we should be talking to the Taliban – one of the things, supposedly, for which McChrystal got dumped, with the Pakistanis also getting in on the act (of which more later).

There are things going on here which do not compute – they really do not compute.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

The wages of stupid?

2010-06-26T16:39:00.003+01:00

In the continuing drama of the Afghan military adventure, Guy Adams of The Independent argues that McChrystal's minders blundered by underestimating a title with a history of heavyweight journalism. And that, he says, is how Rolling Stone was able to bring down a general.

It takes little textual analysis, however, to work out that Adams is guessing. "It's impossible to know what exactly persuaded McCrystal's press staff to invite Hastings (the author of the Rolling Stone piece) into their inner sanctum," he writes, "where he would be privy to a frat-boy atmosphere and culture of contempt for the White House which would ultimately this week force the General to resign from his job as commander of US forces in Afghanistan."

The thesis here, that McChrystal (and through him his staff) have made a massive blunder, is intriguing, but it would seem to fly in the face of the perceived wisdom. The general and his team have a reputation for intellectual depth, and for a comprehensive grasp of their subject and allied matters.

If they really did not know how the Rolling Stone piece would be seen inside the Beltway, and thus be treated by Obama, then we are looking at a staggering level of incompetence, and an alarming degree of naïvety. Even here, where we have been quick to argue that stupidity is a driving force in the military high command, this takes some believing.

However, not only is it very hard to believe that McChrystal could be that stupid, it is equally hard to believe that his boss David Petraeus knew nothing of what was going on and, if he did, that he chose not to intervene - unless he approved it, even if tacitly.

As an alternative, we could go with Con Coughlin who is asking whether McChrystal is the fall guy for the president's failure. The general lost his job as a result of Obama's lack of input into the Afghan war, he argues.

I think even Adams's thesis is preferable to that, but if this was a blunder by McChrystal, we are faced with a terrifying prospect. In a key military adventure, we have a US system that can appoint an idiot for its theatre commander. We also have a situation where the entire military and political establishments on both sides of the Atlantic can roll over and revere an idiot.

Readers here will know that we were not particularly impressed with McChrystal's military (or political) appreciation of the Afghan situation, and we always thought his "surge" ill-founded. But, since all the big-wigs, not least Liam Fox seemed to think the general was the "dog's bollocks" (the correct military term, I believe), who am I to argue?

Actually, this self-deprecation does not become this site. We do argue – this is what we do. The McChrystal "surge" always was, is and always will be dangerously flawed and ineffective – and we have said so. It is a waste of time, money and lives. And the fact that Fox and his mates seem to think differently says more about them than us.

Interestingly, The Times is telling its readers that a newly-elected Tory MP has declared the "war" to be "mission impossible" – and such is the weight of this pronouncement that it puts three of its journalists' names on the story by-line. There's glory for you.

The MP in question is Rory Stewart, "former soldier and diplomat" and prime candidate for replacing Patrick Mercer as favoured media "rent-a-mouth". And out Rory believes that a "radical rethink" is the only option if the Nato-led surge of 40,000 extra troops fails to achieve results by next July. Jeeze! There's real intellectual analysis for you.

And it gets better. Rory believes that only a few thousand troops — perhaps 1,000 of them British — should remain in Afghanistan after next summer. "You would have a few planes (he means aircaft, not a carpenter's tool) around but you would no longer do counter-insurgency. You would no longer be in the game of trying to hold huge swathes of rural Afghanistan."

One way or another, though, it looks as if we are on our way out. Call me Dave has gone public to say that the "very exciting prospect for bringing our troops home" was within sight as Afghans began to take control of security, but that the coming months would be critical. Then asked if troops would be home before the next election, he said: "Make no mistake about it, we cannot be there for another five years having been there for effectively nine years already."

The idea that the Afghans are beginning to take control of security is just bollocks, without even the dog attached – and that is by no means a military term. Neither is the evidence hard to find. Just last week, local UN officials in Kabul were reporting that insurgent violence had risen sharply over the last three months, with roadside bombings, complex suicide attacks and assassinations soaring over last year's levels.

But if talking bollocks is what Call me Dave thinks is necessary to get the troops home, then perhaps it is a small price to pay. In between then – whenever "then" is – and now, Dave will have to go through the charade of fighting a war, and being terribly sorry when the latest squaddie has his brains spread over the terrain. And he is admitting that it's going to be tough going.

At least, though, it looks as if the Buffaloes have turned up in theatre – eighteen months after they were ordered (picture above). They are far too late and too few in number to make a strategic difference but they will reduce the number of times Dave will have to read out the names of the dead from the despatch box. For that small mercy, at least, we can be thankful.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

A vehicle "incident"

2010-06-24T13:15:00.001+01:00

The MoD is reporting the death of four soldiers last night in "a vehicle incident." They were, we are told, part of a team travelling to assist in an incident (another "incident") at a nearby checkpoint in the Nahr-e Saraj area, near Gereshk. This brings the total British military deaths since 2001 to 307.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that all four men were drowned when their 18 ton Ridgeback plunged into the Nahr-e-Bughra canal.

The "accident" happened at 11pm last night and it is likely, Thomas Harding writes, that the driver was travelling using night vision aids rather than headlights in an area that is under threat of IEDs. The track next to the canal is unmarked and has no crash barriers.

This is the first time soldiers have been killed in the Ridgeback which, as we illustrated recently has proven very resilient against IEDs. However, MRAP "rollovers" have become a significant cause of casualties, coming to a head in July 2008 (pictured) - although other vehicle types, including Pinzgauers, Land Rovers and even Warriors have been involved in this type of accident.

Not least of the problems is the road shoulders rarely meet modern engineering standards and may collapse under the weight of MRAPs, especially when the road is above grade and can fall to lower ground (ditches and canals). Thus, we have long argued that more money should be spent on road construction and improvement, rather than vanity projects such as Ferris Wheels and the like.

We appreciate though that such advanced concepts are difficult for the military, officials and (especially) politicians to take on board, which is why it is much easier to require soldiers to thunder down in the darkness in heavily armoured vehicles, from which escape is difficult, with the occasional risk of death when they tip into canals.

But since the senior ranks of the military, the officials and the politicians are not actually at risk, while platitudes come easy and are dirt cheap, this doesn't really matter. Soldiers, as always, are expendable.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

Obama stuffs the military

2010-06-23T19:43:00.002+01:00

In what must rate of a stroke of political genius, Obama has seen off the challenge by the US military over Afghanistan and, by firing McChrystal and appointing his boss Gen David Petraeus, has dumped the problem back in their laps and told them to get on with it.

On the basis that there is nothing new under the sun, there must be a precedent for a field commander being fired and his boss being appointed to replace him, but such incidents are few and far between. However, few can have expected that Obama would take this option and, in the brief period while McChrystal's fate was in the balance, you did not see Petraeus's name in the ring.

What we have been seeing is a huge amount of thrashing about, as commentators struggle and largely fail to make sense of recent events, not realising that this was most likely a deliberate ploy by McChrystal to destabilise Obama and dump the blame for a failing campaign in the lap of the president.

As such, it is most unlikely that McChrystal's quite deliberate and studied coup de main was done without the knowledge and acquiescence (if not approval) of his boss.

By appointing Petraeus to take over from his uppity subordinate – effectively a demotion – Obama demonstrates the skills acquired and honed as a street-fighting Chicago politician. He has reasserted control over – as The Guardian puts it – a politicised military, with the generals out of control.

In so doing, he dumps responsibility for success in Afghanistan in the lap of the supposed architect of the campaign, leaving McChrystal isolated and irrelevant. The Army is still very much in the frame and Obama's message about "civilian control" could not have been clearer.

Hero of the Iraqi "surge" and a Bush appointee, Petraeus must now deliver the goods in Afghanistan or go under. His appointment, to a very great extent, insulates the president from the fray. The new chief is in the hot seat, and with him the military. The game has just changed, and taken on a whole new dimension.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

A quote too far?

2010-06-23T10:00:00.002+01:00

In the closing stages of the film, A Bridge Too Far, we saw Generals Urqhart and Browning starting to distance themselves from what was then evident as a military disaster, with Browning uttering the immortal words: "I always felt we tried to go a bridge too far."

There seems to me to be something of this with Gen Stanley McChrystal and his interview with Rolling Stone magazine. With the man admitting that everything said was on the record, and the magazine checking back with the General's aides before using the quotes, we have on the face of it an example of a senior soldier committing professional suicide.

Reading the article, however, one finds that McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says.

But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the US homeland, the war will do little to shut down al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan.

Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."

"Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan.

"A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war.

To break out of this acknowledged "quagmire" we are seeing perhaps a subtle if not devious ploy, on the lines of the "bridge too far" excuse. As did the British military in Iraq, the US military are going to need an alibi and a "scapegoat" – they need to dump the blame on the politicians.

McChrystal has put Obama in an impossible position. With the president's popularity evaporating, if he fires McChrystal – still a popular General – he takes the blame for when the campaign finally falls apart. If he doesn't fire our Stan, in effect he is endorsing (or not denying) the "contemptuous" comments about the National Security Team, which can then be held responsible for the disasters to come. Obama still gets it.

Basically, it's a win-win for the military, and a sign that the military has lost faith in its own ability to prevail in Afghanistan. The end is nigh and McChrystal may be signalling that all that matters now is who takes the blame.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

We're shocked, shocked!

2010-06-22T17:20:00.000+01:00

We saw recently another example of the vulnerability of the coalition supply chain in Afghanistan and now, under the pretext of news, the BBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times and others, tell us that the US military has been giving tens of millions of dollars to Afghan security firms who are channelling the money to warlords.

Truckers carrying supplies to US troops – according to a Congressional report entitled "Warlord, Inc: Extortion and Corruption Along the US Supply Chain in Afghanistan" - allegedly pay the firms to ensure safe passage in dangerous areas of Afghanistan. And what is more, the convoys are attacked if payments are not made.

Well, we are shocked, shocked, I tell you. In fact, we're so shocked that we were writing about this in June 2008 and then in more detail on 3 September 2009, again on 13 September 2009 (based in part on reports from February 2009, with references from the previous year) and then again on 10 December 2009.

Apart from the obvious comment – like "what took you so long?" – the issue here is of some considerable importance. We are six months into McChrystal's so-called "surge" and even before it started, we knew that huge bribes were being paid to the Taliban, effectively enabling them to keep the war going.

It would have been such a good idea to chop off the flow of funds, before we started pouring men and materiel into the "surge", but no ... such logic is clearly quite beyond the military and political geniuses running this war. So, six months in, the Taliban are likely better off, better equipped and richer than they were before the surge started.

And, while the evidence here is focused on US payments, it is equally the case that the UK is making similar payments. Thus, not only are we the taxpayers funding our own troops in the Afghan adventure, we are also helping to fund the Taliban, alongside the Americans.

Despite this, we have Lieutenant-General Nick Parker tell us that the most important ingredient of success (in Afghanistan) is "an aggressive political strategy that can build on the improving security." He adds: "It should draw further strength from improvements in governance and development and a sense of the inevitability of progress."

I might have written in these terms before, but either the general is irredeemably stupid – which he must be if he believes this guff – or he thinks we are stupid if he is expecting us to believe it. But even someone as thick as an Army Lieutenant-General should be able to understand that paying your enemy to fight you is not a recipe for instant peace or military success.

How then can there be "improving security" when he and his over-paid, over-promoted mates can't even sort out the basics? How can any current plans have any credibility whatsoever when this situation has been known about for years and still nothing is done about it?

Short of stupidity, there can only be massive self-delusion here, which brooks no confidence whatsoever in the conduct of the Afghan mission.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

Clichés by the coffinload

2010-06-21T14:38:00.000+01:00

I was wrong about the blogs to some extent. Craig Murray already has a piece up on the 300 deaths, noting: "We immediately have David Cameron and Liam Fox spewing out the standard propaganda about the occupation of Afghanistan making the world a safer place. This is quite simply a ludicrous proposition, and one to which the security, military and diplomatic establishments do not subscribe."

The BBC refers to this as a "tragic milestone" but what is quite stunning in this intensely political event (and it is a political rather than a military milestone) is the response of Shallow Dave. He is saying that Britain must "keep asking why" its troops are in Afghanistan. That is according to a report in The Times, with the Cleggeron leader leading the tributes to the "sacrifice" made by the 300 British service personnel who have died since operations in Afghanistan began in October 2001.

Says Dave: "It is desperately sad news: another family with such grief and pain and loss. Of course the 300th death is no more or less tragic than the 299 that came before. But it is a moment, I think, for the whole country to reflect on the incredible service and sacrifice and dedication that our Armed Services give on our behalf."

Then Dave tells us: "We are paying a high price for keeping our country safe, for making our world a safer place, and we should keep asking why we are there and how long we must be there."

To that, the man adds: "The truth is that we are there because the Afghans are not yet ready to keep their own country safe and to keep terrorists and terrorist training camps out of their country. That's why we have to be there. But as soon as they are able to take care and take security for their own country, that is when we can leave."

So the clichés are trotted out, carefully honed and polished, kept nicely chilled ready to trot out for such occasions, as meaningless now as they day they were crafted by the 16th PR Battalion of the 31st Right Wing Corps of Spinners – now officially special advisors to the Cleggerons, complete with official salaries and luncheon vouchers.

What is so offensive about all this, of course – apart from the total artificiality of the occasion - is that we have a politician telling us to ask a question: "why are our troops in Afghanistan?" Shallow hasn't quite got the hang of this politics business. We ask the questions, he gives us the answers – except, of course, he doesn't.

Even Con Coughlin thinks "it's not really good enough" for Cameron to say this. "One of the biggest disadvantages that has affected this campaign," he writes, "is the failure of our governing classes to provide clear and effective leadership, and to explain precisely why we have upwards of 10,000 British troops locked in mortal combat with the Taleban."

And, as always, in our desperately cynical age, whenever a politician starts using the word "truth", one learns to check the family silver and the contents of our wallets, certain in the knowledge that the man (or even woman) is up to no good.

The "truth" on this occasion is almost certainly nowhere near what Shallow Dave claims it to be. "We" – i.e., nearly 10,000 very expensive military personnel, several hundred officials and an unknown number of highly-paid contractors – are there because Dave hasn't yet worked out a mechanism for getting them out, and it is probably too early for him to try.

So, for the time being, young men – and the occasional woman – must be slaughtered, to absolutely no effect, to achieve nothing, a process which must continue until such time as it becomes politically convenient for the British contingent to depart. Then it will be up sticks, "job well done, chaps" and the charade of turning defeat into victory starts all over again.

With that the case, though, the very least the political classes could do is to avoid insulting our (collective) intelligence. We really do not need Liam Fox telling us that: "Our armed forces are the best in the world." Even if they were, which is doubtful, what does that mean? Best at what?

He tells us they are "operating daily in the most dangerous and demanding conditions". You don't say! "Some have made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure this essential mission succeeds," he says. Nah. Very few who look upon the prospect of their own deaths regard it as a "sacrifice" – human motivations are much more complex than that.

But then we get the money quote: "My thoughts and those of the nation's are with the families and friends of all those servicemen and women who have fallen but our resolve and determination to see the mission through remains steadfast."

No they are not. The thoughts of the nation are largely with the World Cup, with Wimbledon and with making a living – and keeping the shysters from the government and the other nobs off your back.

But it is always remarkable to hear from the politicians and generals, well clear of the front line and the dangers attendant therein, how our "resolve and determination" must remain "steadfast." So, from the rear, as they pocket their generous salaries and expenses, they say: "stand fast". That is so easy when you are not personally at risk.

Meanwhile, three Australian soldiers and one American service member were killed today in a helicopter crash in southern Afghanistan. Including the crash, at least 57 international troops, including 35 Americans, have died so far this month, a rate that could make June among the deadliest for US and other international forces in the nearly nine-year war. So far, the deadliest for the international force was July 2009 when 75 troops, including 44 Americans, were killed.

But hey! As long as the rest remain "steadfast" and act with "resolve and determination" - until the politicians pull the plug that is - everything in the garden is rosy. But one can't help but feel that if these young men and women are to spread their brains over the Afghan terrain, they deserve something better than second-hand clichés.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

It's happened

2010-06-21T10:56:00.000+01:00

The 300th soldier has died in Afghanistan.

It is a totally meaningless figure, which includes non-combat deaths – and bears no historical comparison: medevac and surgical procedures are so much better that many who in previous campaigns would have died now survive. Did you know, for instance, that 371 British soldiers died in the "official" Cyprus emergency in 1956?

However, being a "round" number, 300 has a certain magic which means it becomes a media event. I bet the Sundays are seriously pissed off, as they were all waiting – bit like vultures, really, but that's the name of the game – for the single soldier to die and make their day.

Actually, the poor sod was hit by an explosion while on patrol in the Sangin district (Sangin again - the mincer) on 12 June and only died yesterday at the New Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham. One should not be too cynical about this but ...

Anyhow, stand by for a certain amount of media comment on the Afghan war, some of it ill-informed, much of it drivel, with some nuggets buried deep in the mass – but very little of interest from the political blogs. Because it's what I do, I'm going to pull together a number of pieces and offer an analysis later today.

In the meantime, The Independent publishes a leading article about Dave's attempt to wrap himself in glory as a war leader. Flags are not the answer, says the paper.

I agree. There is something tawdry and unwholesome about these artificial displays of emotion and ... whatever. They don't ring true. But then, what does these days. More comment to follow.

COMMENT THREAD

What is going on?

2010-06-21T00:15:00.000+01:00

I really did have no plans to do another piece about Bloody Sunday, wanting to move on to other subjects - which I'll now have to do later. But what pulls me back into the fray is an admission to being perplexed, although perhaps one should not be ... was it going to be any different?

Here, I refer to a significant social phenomenon, where we see the Saville Report embraced by the left wing media, and almost totally ignored by the right. That transcends the subject material and makes for an unresolved issue of wide and continuing importance.

It is that which has got me worked up, because I fully expected a rash of stories in the Sundays, for what by any measure was a big and important event – a £191 million report from a 12-year inquiry on an incident which contributed significantly to the length and intensity of a conflict on UK soil which lasted nearly 40 years.

With 5,000 pages in 10 separate volumes, would someone like to tell me that this is not important, that it should not get an airing in the Sundays - all of them? Yet, while we see stories in The Independent on Sunday and others in The Observer, there is nothing of note in The Sunday Times or The Sunday Telegraph or anything by way of useful analysis in The Mail on Sunday.

One can see the direction from which the left wing papers are coming. They have always tended to be "anti-army", or at least non-militaristic, and have been supportive – or more so – of the Irish campaign groups. If not absolutely true, those are certainly the perceptions, while the Right is pro-military, "patriotic" and broadly Unionist in sympathies.

In partisan terms, therefore, one can see the Left being more enthusiastic about Saville, and that is proving to be the case. But the inability of the Right to see the point of the inquiry, and break out of its narrow partisan boundaries is short-sighted and self-defeating.

What should concern the Right are two things: military effectiveness and the proper workings of the judicial system. And in both these areas, there are lessons to be learnt from Bloody Sunday for, on the one hand, it was a military "cock-up" and, on the other, a failure of the justice system.

These are dealt with in three pieces variously in The Independent and The Observer. The first is by lawyer Michael Mansfield in The Independent on Sunday, who asks: "Is nobody bothered that Widgery got it so wrong?"

Hey! That's a good question – and very pertinent. The concluding paragraph of Saville's overall assessment was:

The firing by soldiers of 1 Para on Bloody Sunday caused the deaths of 13 people and injury to a similar number, none of whom was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury. What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army, and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.

Yet it wasn't just the events of Bloody Sunday that did this. It was the fact that the British establishment closed ranks – that Lord Widgery and his team during the first Bloody Sunday inquiry in April 1972 compounded the felony and inflamed bitterness for generations to come.

In a Channel 4 television programme entitled Secret History: Bloody Sunday broadcast in 1992, Bishop Daly said: "What really made Bloody Sunday so obscene was the fact that people afterwards, at the highest level of British justice, justified it."

This failure also needs to be acknowledged, says Mansfield. No system of justice is worthy of its professed principles if, as soon as it is under pressure, its independence and judgement evaporates. And, he says, the system of justice must never again allow itself to be subverted.

Then, also in the IOS is a piece headed: "How the killing of an innocent man may have paved the way for Bloody Sunday".

The man was William McGreanery, shot dead by a British soldier on the streets of Londonderry 15 September 1971, with subsequent allegations that he was carrying a weapon, that he was attempting to fire on the security services and even that he was a member of a paramilitary group.

But McGreanery, who was 41 when he died, has finally been exonerated by an official report which shows that he was an innocent, cut down in what police viewed as cold-blooded murder. However, at the time, the government's response sent a signal to soldiers that they "would be protected as far as the prosecution authorities were concerned."

This meant that the British Army was effectively "being told they would be immune from prosecution, and whatever they did they could do with impunity", thus helped to pave the way for the Bogside assault on 30 January 1972 – in effect, giving the green light to soldiers to act with impunity.

This story is expanded upon in The Observer. It tells us that more than 150 killings committed by soldiers during the Troubles were never fully investigated because of "an informal understanding" between the police and the army, under which soldiers who shot civilians were questioned by the Royal Military Police (RMP) rather than police detectives.

This has been highlighted by a Derry-based human rights organisation, the Pat Finucane Centre, and meant, according to the centre's Paul O'Connor, that between 1970 and 1973 soldiers were unlikely to be held responsible for the consequences of their actions. During that period they shot dead more than 150 people in the province.

An agreement was made in 1970 between the chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the army in Northern Ireland and was not revoked until September 1973 after being found "unsatisfactory". So lax were RMP investigations into killings that they were known as "tea and sandwich inquiries." This failure encouraged a culture of impunity to develop among troops who felt they were above the law, says Paul O'Connor.

So, yet another piece of the jigsaw locks into place, to which is added in the IOS article news of a "unique insight into the mindset of soldiers" on the eve of Bloody Sunday.

This is revealed in an unpublished extract of a book by an officer who served that day. The identity of the author has never been established, but his account was submitted from the Parachute Regiment to the MoD for clearance in the 1970s, only to emerge as new evidence at the Saville inquiry.

It recalls the frustration of dealing with protesters at a march at Dungannon the day before Bloody Sunday: "It was almost as though we were willing them to come out fighting, and bring the whole business down to a level which we could at last understand and appreciate – violence." And the officer tells how morale was high on 30 January:

... after briefing on the promised confrontation – which they were all looking forward to" and "the expectations of 'preparation for battle' kept out the chill of the bright winter morning we had woken up to... This time the 'enemy' had promised us the biggest and best civil rights march... And we would be ready for them – indeed, this was an opportunity we had been waiting for. We, at last, had plans of our own.

The author cites fears that the "plan" was "fraught with danger" of becoming a "GMFU" (grand military fuck-up), and recalls how one officer's wife, on being told of the plans, remarked: "I can just see the headlines – Londonderry's Sharpville."

Also in the same paper is another account - which shows you how seriously the IOS takes the issue. It is a long piece, but the most salient comments comes towards the end, where it describes how the CSM of the 1 Para Support Company - whose men did the killing - broke ranks.

He said he never saw any gunmen, weapons or bombers: "I feel in my own heart a lot of these people were innocent. It was badly handled by everybody." In effect, some of the Paras "lost it". That is what happened on Bloody Sunday.

That now brings us to The Observer which asks: "Were Bloody Sunday soldiers involved in 'Ballymurphy massacre'?" This puts us in the same territory as in my earlier piece with the news that relatives of 11 people killed in Belfast by the army in 1971 are now calling for an inquiry into their deaths

So, what have we got here? On the face of it, we have an Army out of control, imbued with the idea that it is above the law and can kill without penalty, we have that Army actively seeking confrontation in circumstances where civilian deaths could have been foreseen. Then, according to this commentator (or here if that link does not work), the cover-up by the Widgery tribunal amounted to, in effect, retrospective sanctioning by the British government of a massacre.

That thesis is explored here and here and is one of many sober analyses which challenge the perception (and claims) that the Army's counterinsurgency operation in Northern Ireland was in any way a success.

But, to this day, the Army avers that its "great skills" at counter-insurgency were developed and honed in Northern Ireland, a false prospectus which surely cannot be allowed to stand (especially as the Army seems to have difficulties in recalling the lessons it learned). Did it - as some allege - murder and blunder its way through the campaign, just as it seems to have done with all its other poster-child campaigns such as Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus, or can what it says (in whole or part) be taken at face value?

Further, the perception that troops are immune from or above the law seems to survive in other operations, such as the occupation of southern Iraq, and the culture of violence to civilians and cover-up seems to continue to this day. Goodness knows what will emerge from Afghanistan.

These issues, it would seem to me, are not or should not be solely left wing concerns, but should be of interest to the political right. That they seem not to be is the unanswered mystery of this affair. What is going on? Why, even after the elapse of nearly 40 years, is the establishment so keen to bury the lessons (and the debate) instead of learning from them?

Saville Inquiry thread

The greatest failure of them all

2010-06-20T15:14:00.001+01:00

"When the IED detonated, I knew immediately what it was. There was a loud, elongated pop, a lot of dust and the vehicle was thrown about six feet into the air," says Lieutenant Colonel Roly Walker, the commanding officer of the Grenadier Guards battle group.

"The vehicle landed in such a way that I thought we were about to roll but we didn't. Nobody was hurt, we were all wearing helmets and body armour at the time but it's a pretty unnerving experience."

Outside, it was a scene of devastation. The blast ripped off the front wheels of the 15-ton Ridgeback, tossing it high off the ground. The anti-rocket bar armour was shredded and the heavily reinforced hull was cracked. But, amazingly, all six soldiers inside the vehicle escaped uninjured.

The colonel and his team were returning from Patrol Base Silab in Helmand, in January, and had decided to take a route through the desert. It was open and flat. "It wasn't really an obvious vulnerable point," says the colonel.

He continues: "I always thought it was a case of 'when' not 'if' we drove over an IED. So I felt a sense of guilty relief, to be honest. We were unhurt after all ... there was a fair amount of nervous laughter. 'Squaddie' humour kicks in and you don't think too deeply about the 'what if'. The memory stays with you and the next time you move through a VP [vulnerable point], you tend to take it a little more gingerly."

Of course, if Walker had been riding in a Viking, like his predecessor Lt-Col Thorneloe, the chances are that he would now be dead.

Yet, according to Army doctrine – which has spawned the Jackal and other absurdities – these soldiers should not have needed a protected vehicle. After all, they had decided to take a route through the desert, where mobility and unpredictability was supposed to be their protection. Unfortunately, it wasn't, but fortunately they were in a Ridgeback, the smaller cousin to the Mastiff, first introduced in 2006.

And that is why you see Ridgebacks (example illustrated above) leading convoys of highly mobile Vikings. If there is a pressure IED, then the Ridgeback will cop it and the crew will most likely survive. Anything else, apart from a Mastiff, and there is a high probability that you are breaking out the body bags.

That is what is precisely happens in another account which records the experience of a sapper going to the aid of Danish soldiers, one of whom has his body "ripped apart after his vehicle hit a roadside bomb." Although not stated, this is actually this incident where, as we record, the soldiers were driving in a Piranha armoured personnel carrier.

What is highly significant here is that both accounts appear in the same edition of a newspaper were Gen Dannatt (ret) is in given pride of place to promote "Armed Forces Day". This is the man who did his best to block the purchase of protected vehicles in 2006, who supported the purchase of the Vector and, in particular, wanted to buy the Piranha for use in Afghanistan by British forces.

In his writing, Dannatt chooses to quote from Kipling's poem "Hurrah! For the Life of a Soldier", penned in 1892 about how hard-done-by is the British soldier characterised by Tommy Atkins. Dannatt tells us the poem has much resonance today but he neglects another Kipling poem which perhaps has greater resonance, specifically to himself.

This is "The Lesson", written over a decade later, after the British failure in the Boer War. And, in neglecting the other poem Dannatt misses the opportunity to bring to our attention the lines: "It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to use. We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse."

But "fault" is the very last word you will find in Dannatt's vocabulary. Not only has he been the blockage, in preventing the Army being properly equipped to deal with the counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is the man who, as CGS during the seminal years of August 2006 – July 2009, presided over the failure of the British campaign in southern Iraq and the successive tactical and strategic failures in Afghanistan.

Crucially, he only realised the importance of the IED and its strategic effects towards the very end of his tenure so, while he emotes lyrically about Tommy Atkins, he skates over the fact that the death rate of British soldiers in Afghanistan is four times higher than that of US soldiers and is twice that of 2006, when they were described as being involved in the fiercest fighting since their involvement in Korea 50 years ago.

No one would accuse US forces of lacking aggression or of being reluctant to engage with the Taliban, but there are three very obvious differences between the US and British forces. One is that the Americans have a much higher proportion of protected vehicles, and have not gone down the route of using high mobility, unprotected vehicles in their search for protection.

The second is that the US forces employ mine clearance vehicles – equipment not available to the British – reducing the need for vulnerable foot patrols and equally vulnerable bomb disposal personnel. And thirdly, far more helicopters are available to the US forces – the lack of which in the British ranks has also been influenced by Dannatt.

One cannot help but feel a certain sadness, therefore, to see an officer who so egregiously let down his own troops now at the forefront of a campaign enjoining the public to support those same troops. And it is a reflection of the media, which has so often failed to identify the failings of the Army and its Generals, that it now gives so much space to the one General who was perhaps the greatest failure of them all.

Nevertheless, this seems very much in tune with the times, where there is rarely any premium on success and failure is so often rewarded. As he pockets his fees and his pension, Mr Dannatt must be mightily glad this is so. In earlier times, he might have been told to fall on his sword.

COMMENT THREAD

A jolly good unit

2010-06-19T20:35:00.000+01:00

Simon Hoggart in The Guardian today recalls how he had had published in his newspaper six days before "Bloody Sunday", a story headed "The Brutal Soldiery".

In the article, he had made specific allegations about the conduct of the Parachute Regiment and had asserted that some Army units were so fed up with the Paras storming into their areas, firing rubber bullets, beating people up, and undoing months of improved community relations in 10 savage minutes, that they had asked for them not to be sent in again. "Thugs in uniform," one officer had called them.

The article, says Hoggart, caused a great furore, even though he did make it clear – as he was later to do in oral testimony to the inquiry - that the Parachute Regiment was one of enormous skill, enormous courage and enormous resource, but not entirely appropriate in a civilian setting.

Rather than any of the allegations being investigated, though, they were flatly denied. Hoggart and his newspaper "were frozen out for months by the military". He was thought to be in the pocket of the IRA.

From the written evidence submitted to the Saville Inquiry, we can see precisely how the establishment reacted, with Army public relations complaining to Hoggart's boss that even to produce such an article was "unethical and unprofessional conduct."

We can also see that the Army actively considered launching an "attack" on the journalists in the papers Belfast bureau, although it noted that it did not have "enough concrete evidence" against one, who had "covered his tracks very carefully." "However," it went on to say, "Hoggart is professionally vulnerable as a result of his unethical conduct."

Nor were the politicians any better. From the undersecretary of state came the view that there was a "growing feeling" that soldiers were talking too much to the press. HQ Northern Ireland also issued a general warning against any approach from Guardian journalists.

Sadly, one of the observations recorded by Hoggart had been from an Army officer who had told him (of the Paras): "I have seen them arrive on the scene, thump up a few people who might be doing nothing more than shouting and jeering, and roar off again ... They seem to think that they can get away with whatever they like."

It appears though, that the rejection of Hoggart's charges stemmed for a more nuanced position than just a simple, outright refusal to believe them – and anything bad of the Paras. This is hinted at by 1 Para's then adjutant, a certain Captain Mike Jackson – who was to become in 2003 the CGS as General Jackson.

Back in 1972, he dismissed the report as "designed to be divisive", adding: "This is not a realistic picture of the relationship between the Paras and other units in Belfast. We are here to give operational assistance, and we shall continue to do so."

The position is explained more fully in an article by T E Utley published in The Sunday Telegraph on 23 April 1972, nearly two month after Bloody Sunday. He then claimed:

The strategy of the civil rights movement henceforth [that is in context in the autumn 1971] was to keep up a sustained, efficiently directed propaganda campaign, not only against internment, but also against the Army as such. The most vulnerable targets for that campaign were the paratroopers who had been brought into Ulster to act as a reserve force for employment in emergencies that required quick reaction and tough tactics.

On 14 January, two weeks before the shootings, Richard Cox, then defence correspondent for The Daily Telegraph had "alerted his readers to the next phase in this propaganda chain." He had claimed that Irish journalists were seeking to entrap officers of other regiments into admitting that the use of the Paras in Ulster had been disastrously counter-productive.

In effect, therefore, the allegations against the Paras were all part of an IRA propaganda campaign and could safely be ignored. Thus, almost exactly 30 years later, the first soldier to give evidence to the Saville Inquiry was to describe the Paras as a "jolly good" unit.

This was General (then Brigadier) Frank Kitson, in January 1972 the commander of 39 Brigade, of which the 1 Para was part. In his oral evidence, he told the Saville Inquiry:

If some people in Northern Ireland associated 1 Para with a reputation for toughness and brutality, I think they were mistaken. The regiment's reputation in this respect was probably fuelled by its effectiveness in controlling difficult situations. By their resolute action they often prevented situations escalating into violence between the Catholic and Protestant communities which was the one thing above all others that we wished to avoid, because it provided an excuse for gunmen to present themselves as defenders of their local community. I believe that 1 Para's effectiveness in this field contributed greatly to the saving of life.

Hoggart, however, takes "a little satisfaction" in the Saville Inquiry finding that he was right. He was in Belfast on Bloody Sunday and, he writes, "everyone realised instantly what a terrible turning point it would be ... Even the army immediately realised what had happened."

For the IRA, says Hoggart, it provided in an instant all the moral justification they needed to kill as many people as they pleased. Every victim of the Paras, shot while crawling down the streets of Derry, carried dozens more people with him to the grave.

But, if the Army had realised this, there was still the charade of the Widgery Inquiry later in 1972, when the cover-up was cemented into place. And a few months later, the CO of 1 Para, Lt-Col Derek Wilford, a man now criticised by the Saville Inquiry, was awarded an OBE.

The meaning of the signal sent to the Irish by that award is obvious. The Paras were a "jolly good unit", and no amount of killing was going to change that.

Saville Inquiry thread

Richards for chief?

2010-06-18T18:08:00.000+01:00

"The most important appointment of a generation", writes Con Coughlin on the appointment of a new CDS. And, given the portentous title of the piece, you might have thought that it would get better exposure than being tucked into the print edition after the editorial page.

But such is the competition for space that the more important news story gets poll position. And who are we to argue with such fine editorial judgement? One is simply amazed that Guido or Iain Dale didn't get there first, or that The Boy has not made a statement in the House about a development of such importance.

Back in the trivial world inhabited by the likes of Coughlin, he is saying that the new CDS will be "the most important appointment of a generation" – and he is not wrong, although the choice should be determined by the intentions.

In my view, if this current administration has any real intentions of winning through in Afghanistan (not that it has much chance of so doing), it might be better opting for Gen Richards, the recently appointed CGS. If it wants to manage defeat, then Houghton is probably the better man.

What emerges from Coughlin's piece, though, is what purports to be an insider view of The Boy's recent summit at Chequers, where his newly instituted National Security Council was convened to discuss the war in Afghanistan, the culmination of which was to adopt the Labour government's strategy.

We are told that deep gloom pervaded the proceedings as a succession of speakers explained how Britain was involved in a war that was not only increasingly unpopular with the public, but one that would ultimately end in failure. Even Cameron appeared to subscribe to the view that the sooner he ordered "our boys" to return home the better.

Coughlin, of course, was not there, so he is picking this up second or even third-hand – or maybe he has several sources. However informed, he feels able to tell us that what turned the meeting round was "some blunt speaking" on the part of the military professionals. Their argument was that while the war might be costly, both in terms of the blood and treasure, and present enormous challenges, there are encouraging signs that it is finally moving in the right direction.

This is from a man who himself must be one of the few journalists who still believes the war is still winnable and, thus fortified, he tells us that the alliance now "has a clearly formulated and effective strategy for ending the conflict and rebuilding the country after nearly three decades of strife."

But, where The Boy has earlier seemed equivocal on Afghanistan, Coughlin notes that he appears to have taken the "wise" military counsel to heart, throwing his full support behind Nato's (i.e., Gen McChrystal's) surge strategy, warning that the British public should brace itself for further casualties during this summer's offensive.

You have to do a double-take, though, to check you are not reading a copy of Private Eye when you read Coughlin earnestly telling us that, in its first weeks in office, the Cleggeron administration (he calls it "the government") has discovered first-hand "the importance of being able to draw upon well-informed and expert military advice".

Quite where that advice is coming from it difficult to determine, especially as Gen Richards (of whom Coughlin rather approves) was not present at the meeting. But, "to guarantee this advice remains of the highest calibre" writes Coughlin, it is crucial that Mr Cameron makes the right choice when he comes to appoint a successor to Jock Stirrup.

In principle, one would not disagree with that, and on that basis Coughlin definitely thinks the man in the hot seat should be Richards. The only problem he sees is that the current CGS has a reputation for speaking his mind, a virtue that might not be appreciated by the Cleggerons, who are "anxious to avoid controversy".

That opens the way for Houghton, says Coughlin, a man regarded as a smooth Whitehall operator – a "civil servant in uniform". But, since Britain is entering a crucial stage in this nation's proud military history, one that will demand strong, effective and professional leadership, Coughlin personally hopes that Cameron has "the political courage and good sense" to appoint Richards as the next CDS.

What no one has ascertained so far, though, is whether Richards actually wants the job. Depending on one's view of the future, in the short-to-medium term, the best career option for Richards might be to put as much distance as he can between himself and a widely expected disaster. And, putting it that way, one might argue that anyone mad enough to want to become CDS is clearly totally unsuitable for the post.

COMMENT THREAD

The politics of delusion

2010-06-17T20:27:00.000+01:00

How much traction this is going to get is difficult to judge. So far, only the BBC seems to have covered it – the so-called Ballymurphy Massacre in August 1971, just short of six months before Bloody Sunday. Then, 11 people - ten men, including a local priest, Father Hugh Mullan, who was shot while giving the last rites to a dying man, and a mother of eight children - were killed, again by soldiers from 1 Para.

Now, on the back of the Saville Report, the relatives are demanding their own inquiry into what they claim is the brutality of the Paras, remarking on the similarities with Bloody Sunday where the British system also "connived in a cover-up."

The events followed the introduction of internment on 9 August 1971, and the details of the affair are admirably set out in a Times archive blog. There it is noted that "the tone of the Army statements shows an extraordinary lack of awareness of the real nature of the struggle they were engaged in."

In a struggle that was about to be launched into a whole new phase and was to drag out for more than two decades before a resolution even began to look feasible, Brigadier Marston Tickell, the Army chief of staff in Northern Ireland, was claiming that the hard core of the IRA had been "virtually defeated".

Looking back at those events, even at the time - as we saw them recorded in our newspapers and on our TV screens – the Army's optimism seemed delusional. But what was less evident was the brutality with which the Army – or some sections of it – was operating.

However, almost immediately after the internment programme had been implemented, reports started to come in of Army mistreatment of prisoners. On 17 August, allegations were published that soldiers had urinated on prisoners, subjected them to electric shocks and threatened to hurl them from helicopters.

What was so significant, though, was that even as detailed allegations of troops' brutality continued to be made, most Army officers were prepared only admit that their soldiers had been "brisk" in their handling of Irish civilians. They largely believed – as did most of us - that many of the allegations being made were so totally out of character with British troops' behaviour as to be "ludicrous".

As it turned out, the allegations were very far from being ludicrous and, as the evidence mounted, they served to poison the image of the British Army in the eyes not only of the Roman Catholic community here and of a large section of the population of the Irish Republic, but also in overseas countries and particularly in the United States. That was not only to do a great deal of damage, but was also directly to prolong the conflict.

Thus are the "Ballymurphy Massacre" relatives currently saying that, had their allegations been taken seriously at the time and acted upon, then maybe Bloody Sunday might never have happened. The corrective action would have been taken, and history would have been changed.

But it is an Irish columnist, Kevin Myers, who puts his finger on the issues, noting that Bloody Sunday, was not unique: it was merely an extravagant example of what the Parachute Regiment was already doing - and would continue to do - in Northern Ireland.

Something like 90 percent of clearly unlawful army killings throughout the Troubles were by the three battalions of the Parachute Regiment. Both Catholic priests who died in the Troubles were shot by the Paras and were, to his mind, murdered.

Other Para killings included shooting dead Patrick Magee, an innocent 20-year-old student teacher on the steps of St Comgall's school on the Falls Road as he left teaching practice. The same day, the Paras shot dead one-eyed Patrick Donaghy, aged 86, one of the oldest victims of the troubles. He was killed as he stood at his window, eight storeys up in Divis Towers.

The real crime, Myers says, was not just the killings that Lord Saville has been investigating in his insanely wasteful enquiry, but the tolerance of the Parachute Regiment's conduct by both the British army and successive British governments. He continues:

That is the real mystery. Because the IRA had no better friend than the Parachute Regiment; wherever the Paras went, IRA recruitment subsequently rose. The price to be paid for their random and reckless brutality was the lives of other soldiers and the many, many more civilians killed by the IRA.

So why wasn't it stopped? Why, asks Myers, was the Parachute Regiment deployed in Northern Ireland and why was its often evil conduct tolerated?

Here, we have the clue in the response of Army officers to accusations of brutality – a belief that they (the accusations) were so totally out of character with British troops' behaviour as to be "ludicrous".

This is the politics of delusion, the determination to believe what you want to believe, a rejection of anything which might contradict the received wisdom and what I call "constructive ignorance", a wilful, culpable refusal to seek out any information which might challenge the preferred narrative.

And this is why, contrary to the genuine expectations of commentators such as Subrosa, there can be no real closure, partial or otherwise. The system has been caught out but there is no real contrition, no acceptance of blame and no real change. Delusion is still a powerful policy driver, pervading every nook and cranny of government.

This is evident in the likes of Iain Dale, who seems to prefer the idea that Bloody Sunday was an aberration, with "merely a small part of the British armed forces" at fault that day, and even Owen Paterson, who has agreed to meet the Ballymurphy campaigners, cannot offer a remedy to the underlying ailment.

Slugger O'Toole believes that the publication of the Saville report heralded a good day for reconciliation, others would castigate Tony Blair even for allowing the Saville Inquiry, calling him "insane" for agreeing to it, and Daniel Finkelstein insists that the soldiers are treated with the same leniency as the IRA, thus not even beginning to understand the issues.

Martin Meenagh thinks the greatest unindicted villain of the piece was Edward Heath. Lurking behind the Paratroopers' action that day is the general fuhrerbefehl he issued, to show the natives who was in charge. Meenagh may not be wrong.

Jim Greenhalf, on the other hand, reminds us that sometime this week, next week, the death toll of British soldiers in Afghanistan will reach 300. The ultimate political result when we pull out next year, or the year after, will be "job well done", as it was after we left Iraq, which cost us 179 dead soldiers, he says.

And that will be another delusion, to sit alongside the delusion that the British Army is a saintly (and competent) institution that can be relied upon to do the job and do it well.

If nothing else, Saville has challenged that, although the wider lessons have hardly begun to be appreciated. But, if we the public, in general, and the politicians and military in particular, believe that Saville applies only to Bloody Sunday, that will be another delusion.

Saville Inquiry thread

A high level failure

2010-06-17T00:17:00.000+01:00

Too quickly it seems, Dannatt is getting his way: the media is moving on from the Saville Report – although the Sundays may return to the issue. But, with over £190 million spent on the damn thing, the very least we should do is get our money's worth from it.

Thus, before we leave the issue for the time being – doubtless to return at some time in the future – I feel impelled to offer a few more observations, not least a suggestion that too many of the current pundits seem to be missing the point, the very point I made in my original piece about 1st Para, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things".

But, by no means all of the pundits are missing the point. In The Independent there is Robert Fisk, who writes:

We knew the First Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. "Tough" was the word we reporters used if the soldiers were beating up rioters. Brutal was the word we should have used. But sometime towards the end of 1971, I think we all realised that the Parachute Regiment was being prepared for some pretty nasty confrontations. They were the hard men, the reserve battalion at Palace Barracks, Holywood, a boring seaside town on the south side of Belfast Lough, a unit that spent most of its time waiting for trouble.

If that is from one end of the political spectrum, though, we also have Max Hastings, writing in The Daily Mail, who was in Derry on Bloody Sunday. From him we get:

An English reporter friend of mine that day in Derry found himself trapped among demonstrators and rioters. He asked a soldier manning a barricade if he could squeeze past their line to find safety behind the troops. "No, you bastard!", snarled the squaddy. "You stay there and take what's coming to you."

At that stage, mid-afternoon, only CS gas and rubber bullets were being used. But I myself met Paras preparing to conduct the planned "scoop-up" operation to arrest rioters, who were obviously spoiling for action. The Paras are a great military institution, but quite unsuited to peacekeeping. They are a fighting regiment, and that day they expected and wanted to fight.

Hastings, the terribly grand former Daily Telegraph editor, is the man who writes with the authority of "being there", and is therefore treated with great respect. But he nevertheless talks a great deal of tosh, as when he tells us: "The Army, enraged by terrorist killings, was in a savage mood, and still relatively new to the restraints essential for counterinsurgency."

Here the point is that, virtually since the end of World War II, the British Army had been doing little else but counterinsurgency, and no more so than 1 Para. Formed on 15 September 1941, the battalion operated in Haifa during the Palestine Mandate until British troops withdrew in 1948. It was then temporarily disbanded on return to the UK but reconstituted in 1949.

From mid 1951 to 1954, it saw active service in Cyprus, the Canal Zone in Egypt and during counter-terrorist operations against EOKA in Cyprus in 1956. It participated in the Suez landings during the crisis in November, before being back in Cyprus in 1958. Between 1962-3, the battalion served in Bahrain, in early 1964 undertook a UN peace-keeping in Cyprus and in 1965 and 1966 was back in Bahrain. The battalion covered the eventful withdrawal from Aden in 1967 after 127 years of British rule.

The first of its 12 Northern Ireland Op Banner emergency tours began at the end of 1969, two years after it had left Aden – at which time the use of firearms in riot control was standard procedure.

Much is made (not least by The Independent) of the evidence of General Ford, commander, land forces in Northern Ireland (pictured above). He revealed to the inquiry that in 1971 he was "coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary … is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued".

In other words, wrote Ford, "we would be reverting to the methods of IS [internal security] found successful on many occasions overseas" – precisely the methods 1 Para would have been trained to use in Palestine, Egypt, Cyprus and Aden. Thus, with its reputation, background, experience and training, it would have been entirely predictable that committing 1 Para to the pressure cooker of Londonderry in January 1971 would have produced a violent outcome.

And "pressure cooker" it was. On 8 July 1971 in Derry's Bogside two rioters, Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie, had been shot dead by soldiers in disputed circumstances.

The military had claimed the pair were armed, which had been denied by local people. Moderate nationalists including John Hume and Gerry Fitt walked out of the parliament of Northern Ireland in protest. A British Army memorandum stated that as a result of this, the situation "changed overnight". The Provisional IRA's campaign in the city beginning at that time after previously being regarded as "quiescent"

In January 1972, to all intents and purposes, violence is what the Army and the media expected, as indeed did the politicians. Heath apparently told his cabinet committee on Northern Ireland that: "As to Londonderry, a military operation to re-impose law and order would be a major operation necessarily involving numerous civilian casualties."

Where the failure came, therefore, was in not realising the political implications of such violent scenes, spread over the pages of the newspapers and on the TV screens. 1 Para would have done much worse in Aden and elsewhere, but not in the full glare of the media.

Journalist Kevin Cullen was later to write (now two years ago): "Over the years, I met dozens of men who joined the IRA because a British soldier harassed or humiliated them or their families." He went on:

Thirty-six years ago this week, the army rounded up hundreds of Catholic men and teenagers, few of whom were actually in the IRA. Far from smashing the IRA, the army's overzealous policy of internment without trial infuriated the entire nationalist community.

And in 1972, when British paratroopers killed 14 unarmed demonstrators in Derry on Bloody Sunday, the IRA was flooded with recruits. Half of the more than 3,500 people killed in the Troubles died in the fury of the five years that followed Bloody Sunday.

From General Michael Rose, we get confirmation of this. On Bloody Sunday, he says, it was absolutely clear that in exchanging fire with the terrorists, the British Army had fallen into the trap laid for them by the IRA, who had set out that day to commit murder and mayhem, caring nothing for the lives of their own republican supporters. Claims Rose:

Indeed, I believe it was their specific aim to get as many people killed as possible. For the deaths would serve as a ruthlessly cynical recruiting tool. As the news of the dead in Londonderry that day spread around the world, the result was much the same as Irish people everywhere rallied to the nationalist cause. In Northern Ireland, in the Irish Republic and in the US, thousands of young men and women joined the IRA.

And all of this puts the focus up the chain of command, into the high level military and political arenas, where – clearly – tactical and strategic errors were made in terms of the conduct of the campaign.

The other day, I wrote about the battle of Dien Bien Phu being lost not in the little valley in Viet-Nam's highland jungles but in the air-conditioned map room of the French commander-in-chief.

By the same token it seems to me, the slaughter of Bloody Sunday happened through the failures of the military brass and the politicians to appreciate the special demands of a counterinsurgency campaign in Northern Ireland. One has to marvel at the political naïvety.

What did the Army really think would happen, with the media camped on the doorstep and TV cameras on permanent standby, if they started shooting rioters and demonstrators? Were they really so stupid or so isolated from the political realities that they did not realise that images of dead bodies plastered all over the TV screens and the newspapers might have an adverse effect on public sentiment?

But, as always, the BPI are in the frame. That much I wrote earlier but, with even greater clarity, the idea of a high level failure stands up. This is where we should be looking to lay the blame. One wonders, therefore, precisely for what Mr Cameron was apologising ... the incompetence of the Army High Command, or the greater and more serious incompetence of the Heath government, which bears the ultimate responsibility.

Saville Inquiry thread

Let's not

2010-06-16T13:03:00.000+01:00

Move along there, nothing to see here, writes Richard Dannatt: "We must not dwell on the errors of the past". The fact that the Saville Inquiry has taken nearly 38 years to arrive at the truth means that its lessons are of limited use, Dannatt then asserts. "How we view things in 2010 is inevitably different from how we viewed them in 1972."

Well, that may be the case, although the assertion is highly debatable - even if there is a great deal of revisionism going on. But we are certainly not always doing things differently. British soldiers are still murdering people, with officers turning a blind eye, and Ministers still lie about events.

Furthermore, the Paras are still slaughtering civilians in the mistaken belief that they are being fired upon – although if only brown people in faraway places get killed it doesn't seem to matter so much.

But, most of all, the cover-ups still go on and, as Raedwald points out, there are still plenty of bent inquiry chairmen and whitewashers, obedient to the political class rather than to truth and to honour.

It is, thus, all very well Cameron apologising to the relatives and friends of the Bloody Sunday victims, but what about an apology to us, for being lumbered with a bill of £191 million to remedy the cover-up? What happened on Bloody Sunday, he says, "was both unjustified and unjustifiable." But what happened afterwards was also "unjustified and unjustifiable."

Equally "unjustified and unjustifiable" is the assertion by Gen Sir David Richards, current CGS – ranking alongside Dannatt's claims – his insistence that the Army had changed greatly over the 38 years since Bloody Sunday.

But it is just over 100 years since the Army failed so egregiously in the Boer War, following which Kipling published his poem, The Lesson. "Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, we have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good," he wrote.

Yet we are dealing with an Army which, 100 years later failed in Iraq and has since refused publicly to examine the lessons of that failure, only to repeat its mistakes in Afghanistan.

So, no Mr Dannatt, I don't think we should move on just yet. We should dwell on the errors of the past, long enough at least to learn the lessons from them, otherwise, as the Army seems so keen to do, we are doomed to repeat them, again and again and again.

Saville Report thread

And now for the Saville Report

2010-06-15T16:19:00.000+01:00

As The Boy stands up to make a statement on the £191-million Saville Report, news comes in that two soldiers from 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment have been shot dead in separate incidents in Afghanistan. They died while on patrol in the Nad Ali district of Helmand province.

Their deaths bring the total number of UK troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 298. Two more and we have a magic round number, so we can have another media blut-fest. It may just beat the historical account of the Paras slaughtering 14 innocent civil rights demonstrators and bystanders, an event which was to rack up the intensity of the "Troubles" and cost many more lives.

It is axiomatic that crowd control requires very special skills and discipline. Putting poorly-trained troops under the command of inexperienced officers on the front line, with rifles and live ammunition, is asking for a disaster. We did not need a report costing £191 million to tell us that.

The disaster happened on 30 January 1972, so-called "Bloody Sunday", when the gung ho* 1st Para manned the line, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things", for which purposes it was designed, trained and equipped.

The resultant carnage, therefore, was not the fault of the soldiers (the Army was to lose over 100 troops that year), any more than the failures in Afghanistan are the fault of individual soldiers of the line. For that, we must look to the politicians who put them there and their senior officers. Talk of prosecution of the soldiers who fired the shots is misplaced.

But, as so often when innocent people get killed, the PBI takes the shit and we pay the bills. The lawyers walk away with the dosh (in this case, several of them have "earned" millions in fees), the officers get gongs and more sewing badges and the politicians get honours and awards. Then as now, nothing really changes.

* Saville Report: Chapter 4, para 4.8: "... a force with a reputation for using excessive physical violence".

COMMENT THREAD

Moral and intellectual cowardice

2010-06-15T15:15:00.000+01:00

It is a bit of a cop-out for the Tory Boy blog just to paraphrase Liam Fox's speech to RUSI yesterday, and then to offer a link with no analysis. But, like the rest of the Tory blogosphere, they're running frit on defence issues, not even picking up on the Great Leader's speech. It seems they can do the soft and girlie issues but can't cope with real political meat.

Talking to a journalist yesterday about the reluctance of the "right wing" blogs to deal with defence, he suggested that individual writers might be deterred by their lack of first-hand experience. They are intimidated by men in uniform, with their medals and sewing badges and tales of derring-do, and fear laying themselves open to criticism for "not being there".

I certainly had to deal with that in writing Ministry of Defeat - a whole book about the campaign in southern Iraq without ever once going as far as Basra. In that precise context, reading accounts of the great 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu (where I was also absent), I came across in Bernard Fall's book this observation:

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was lost during the brief fortnight between Novermber 25 and December 7, 1953. It was not lost in the little valley in Viet-Nam's highland jungles but in the air-conditioned map room of the French commander-in-chief. Once Giap had decided to accept trial by battle at Dien Bien Phu, it remained only for 15,000 French and 50,000 Viet-Minh troops to act out the drama in pain and blood and death.

So it was with Iraq. The British lost the battle not in the streets of al Amarah and Basra, but in the corridors of Whitehall and the claustrophobic rooms of 10 Downing Street (yes, I have been inside). "Being there", in the sense of being where the action was, would mean being in many different places (often simultaneously) and many where only insiders had access. Constructing a historical narrative, therefore, requires the use of research skills, not direct observation of events.

In the context of the military telling us that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan – one thing the limited intellects of the military brass seem to be able to understand – the "battle" is essentially political. Thus, the battle is being lost not on the streets of Kabul, Kandahar and Musa Qala, but in the corridors of Whitehall and the claustrophobic rooms of 10 Downing Street.

The refusal to follow the narrative and engage with the politics represents one of the greatest failings of the right-wing "claque". There is a moral and intellectual cowardice here – which explains the lack of response to my recent challenge. However, this is not the first time I've taken on the "claque", having written a strongly-phrased piece in September 2006 and again in January 2007.

I know the pieces were read, and the lack of comment and response is driven by a sense of shame and embarrassment – some have admitted as much to me privately. And as well they might hang their heads in shame.

But one person not afraid to get stuck in is our feisty "Dundee wifey" who vastly outshines these big, butch political bloggers who are so full of themselves. She picks up a military blog called Think Defence which has The Boy's strategy sussed. This is the "Iraq gambit", which comprises two broad elements:

1. Get the fuck out of dodge;
2. Pretend it was a victory.

In fact, while the girly-boy bloggers cower in their bunkers, it is very much the fairer sex which makes the running, with Mary Riddell telling us that, "Britain is stuck with a war it can't afford and can't win".

In a powerful turn of phrase, she writes of "Mr Fox's batsqueak of truculence" which "echoes the discredited Blairite credo that Britain should punch above its weight and beyond its purse." Both Mr Cameron and the opposition, she says, "owe the country more honesty."

Indeed they do, but as long as the fabled right-wing blogosphere is sitting on its hands, with its collective heads in a physiologically impossible position, The Boy has neither need nor incentive to do anything other than to continue on his ruinous course. But he will need more than a metal detector (pictured) to chart his way though this minefield. We've seen it all before with Iraq so some of us already know what he is doing. We will not be silent, even if the "claque" has muzzled itself.

COMMENT THREAD

Our mission is doomed

2010-06-15T00:02:00.001+01:00

So, "Call me Dave" made a statement to the Commons yesterday, his first since his trip to Afghanistan as Cleggeron leader, supposedly spelling out his administration's approach to the ongoing conflict.

Heavily trailed as paving the way for a change in strategy, it followed extensive talks with Karzai at Chequers and meetings with US defence secretary Robert Gates and Gen David Petraeus in Downing Street – all on the back of a delegation of three Cabinet ministers being sent to Afghanistan to see the situation on the ground for themselves.

But, if there were expectations of a change in strategy, they were not fulfilled. One even wonders why The Boy actually bothered with a statement. He offered nothing new, nothing different. All he really wanted to do was emphasise why, in his view, our troops were in Afghanistan. It was all about national security. Afghanistan was not strong enough to look after its own security and without our presence it could emerge again as an al Qaida base.

What had changed then, one might ask, to which The Boy provided the answer: we needed to be clear on national security perspective.

Our route home was to put security first. We were six months in to the surge and had to give it time to take effect. We would not stay a day longer than necessary – the key was in training the Afghan security forces so that we could transfer the security responsibility, but based on facts on the ground not pre-determined timetable. Then we could come home, job done, heads held high.

And that was it. In a sparsely attended chamber there was no hint of the huge controversy which has been raging over the weekend, with the likes of Matthew Parris asserting that Cameron and Clegg "must know our mission is doomed", up against the controversial General Dannatt who believes the war can be won.

Of these two, soldier Dannatt is ostensibly better qualified - but Parris has the advantage of consistency. He has always been against the Afghan adventure, right from 2006, when he decided that the mission could not work with 3,000 or even with 30,000 men, in June 2008, when he declared we couldn't win and now, when he thinks we are simply sacrificing soldiers to keep the US on-side.

Parris is too sincere and his case too well argued for it to be dismissed as cynical, while Dannatt is too stupid for his case to be considered at all. He trots out the bog standard "exit strategy" meme, arguing that the Afghans must run their own security and "the Afghan economy must be converted as quickly as possible from one based on the illegal opium trade, to one profiting from traditional cash crops, such as wheat, saffron and pomegranates."

If pigs could fly and politicians could think coherently, the world would be a very different place, but either is about as likely as Dannatt's nostrums for Afghanistan. And then you realise that the General is offering exactly the same prospectus as "Call me Dave". The mission is indeed doomed.

COMMENT THREAD

Houghton the pathfinder?

2010-06-13T17:16:00.004+01:00

It was The Sunday Times which broke the news today that Jock Stirrup was to be "axed" by the new administration, alongside Sir Bill Jeffrey, the permanent undersecretary at the MoD.

That the CDS should be given his marching orders comes as no surprise. He had always been regarded as a Labour man or, as a slightly partisan Col Tim Collins told the paper, "... a well-known apologist for Labour muddled thinking over Afghanistan."

Actually, Stirrup had played a key role in securing mine/IED protected vehicles in August 2006, over the heads of the Army which did its best to block the purchase, and had thus attracted the gratitude of ministers who were having to carry the can for the Army brass's indifference to casualties.

Then, with the increasingly erratic CGS, Richard Dannatt, playing the prima donna, it was necessary to ensure that there was no possibility of him stepping up to become CDS. It being the Army's turn to take the top slot, extending Stirrup's term to block Dannatt was a necessary move, giving breathing space to Dannatt's successor, David Richards who, after a short period as CGS, could rightly step up to replace Stirrup in the April of next year.

Unfortunately (for him), Stirrup's apparent favour with Labour ministers – together with an impression that he was under-performing (which indeed he was) – essentially marked his cards. Certainly, he has attracted no great support from the Army. Lt-Col Stuart Tootal, who commanded the first detachment of 1,200 UK troops into Helmand, told the BBC that he bore a share of the blame for the "chronic mismanagement" of the armed forces.

Tootal admits that, "We have a tendency to blame ministers," but, he says, "we can't ignore the role of the professional heads in the form of the CDS and PUS (permanent under-secretary), who advise our ministers on what the armed forces should look like and what they do." He claims Stirrup was forcefully advised by commanders on the ground in Helmand of the "absolute requirement" for more troops and helicopters, but was "very slow" to recognise the need to act.

This may be an additional reasonb why the new defence secretary has decided to "let him go" as early as he decently could, which will be this autumn. Ostensibly, his departure – alongside the lack-lustre Jeffrey, who never amounted to much – marks the new administration seeking to draw a line under past failures in Afghanistan, and is intended to improve the military's performance on the Afghan front line.

However, the announcement from Fox – which comes in an interview with The Sunday Times rather than as a formal statement to parliament – is inviting some rather bizarre commentary.

Patrick Mercer, the standard renta-mouth for such occasions, tells The Sunday Times that change at the top of the MoD was desperately needed. "The last regime allowed our men to go into Helmand improperly prepared, while huge sums of money were squandered on projects such as the refurbishment of the Ministry of Defence," he says.

That is the sort of partisan irrelevancy one would expect from Mercer (as if the CDS was the driver behind the MoD refurbishment), but Adam Holloway does himself no favours by remarking: "There was a tendency under the Labour government to promote 'politicians in uniform' rather than officers willing to give frank advice about the strategic drift in Afghanistan."

The we have Rear-Admiral Chris Parry saying the Stirrup's successor should "stand clear of political considerations". His view is that: "Officers have been willing to let themselves be politicised as a means of climbing up the promotion ladder."

But both the Chiefs of Defence Staff the General Staff are always "politicians in uniform". To expect their successors to be any different is fantasy. In fact, by acting early, Fox is more likely to ensure a "political" successor, as the two likely candidates for the job are David Richards and the vice-chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton (pictured).

It is a little bit early for Richards to take the job as he is only just bedding in as CGS, working on undoing some of the damage done by Dannatt. Thus, Houghton, a consummate politician, is favourite to get the job.

This is the man who, according to his own testimony, was instrumental in engineering the extraction of the British Army from Basra, working to the highly political brief of: "getting out of Iraq with reputation intact, with a defendable legacy."

And that might be the best clue as to what is going on. Fox is emphasising that he wants "the best people to be in the appropriate posts," while hinting that he is looking to substantial personnel cuts in the armed forces, to help him trim budgets – which can only happen with a reduced commitment in Afghanistan.

With Houghton in post, Fox would have the ideal man to manage an expeditious retreat from theatre. He will have a man practiced in the art of lying through to teeth to protect the reputation of the British Army and in pretending that its legacy is substantial and enduring – thus allowing the new defence secretary to sharpen his axe.

Houghton the "pathfinder" will pave the way.

COMMENT THREAD

Approach to Helmand "flawed"

2010-06-12T14:55:00.001+01:00

The Today programme has picked up on the Afghanistan series in The Times, interviewing Conservative MP Adam Holloway and Rear Admiral Chris Parry, the MoD's director-general of development, concepts and doctrine in 2006. The interview has since been reported by the Press Association and The Sun.

Parry's comments are especially interesting as he played a key role in discussions leading up to the initial deployment of troops to Helmand in 2006 and he has now admitted that the MoD's approach to the mission was "flawed".

Echoing then defence secretary John Reid's comment at the time, that he hoped the UK would leave Helmand without a shot being fired, Parry confirms that the MoD top brass were not expecting to have to fight the Taliban in the province.

"I think we had an immature approach to what is now known as counter-insurgency," says Parry. "We didn't realise the complexity and the character of the context in which we were going to fight. In fact, we didn't envisage we were going to fight."

He goes on: "I think we took too much baggage with us from previous experience from Borneo, Malaya and Northern Ireland and we hadn't really recognised that the lessons we had taken from those campaigns were valid, but they weren't sufficient for the context of Afghanistan, or indeed Iraq."

Then, for the coup de grace, Parry says: "I think at the time there was considerable senior resistance to ditching the lessons from the past and moving on to more radical and progressive ideas. The senior military at the time actually believed different things about what should be done in Afghanistan. The old doctrine, the thinking about how we conduct that sort of campaign still prevailed."

At this stage, as my readers may well imagine, this blogger's blood pressure was escalating to a dangerous level. Multi-adjectival descriptive sentences were forming, in which the word "fuckwit" could qualify as one of the mildest and most complimentary.

When I think of the shit I took from any number of commentators for daring to question the wisdom and expertise of our military "experts", who so obviously knew what they were doing ... and now we get the admission that these great experts were "immature" and that they "didn't realise the complexity and the character of the context in which we were going to fight."

However, one must take a calmer, more analytical approach – which I managed to do after walking several times round the garden, kicking the cat, slamming a few doors and only with difficulty resisting the temptation to punch the laptop keys through the machine and embed them in the table below.

Thinking back to the time, we knew that our great military geniuses like Jackson and Dannatt were basing their strategy on "memories" of Northern Ireland, but actually more so in Iraq than in Afghanistan.

It is interesting though that Parry speaks of "memories" – it was the memory rather than the actuality that was being applied. While the British military was lording it over the Septics, claiming greater knowledge of counter-insurgency though NI experience, the one thing that became very clear was that the lessons of Northern Ireland were applied neither in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In fact, as I point out in Ministry of Defeat, the lessons learned were almost completely ignored in Iraq – which makes it rather interesting that Parry, the man actually responsible for doctrine, is still claiming that Northern Ireland experience did guide strategy.

As regards Afghanistan, the very attraction of this theatre was that the Brown Jobs – having been roundly whipped by the Mahdi Army in Basra and al Amarah – were looking for a new venue where they could play with their toys, without the fuzzies getting too uppity and breaking them. Insofar as there was a strategy in the early days, it was made "on the hoof". It owed nothing to COIN and stemmed more from Rourke's Drift and the Alamo, only with more modern toys.

Once of course, the mad mullahs of the Taliban found that they too – like the Mahdi Army – were having difficulty ousting the British Army from fixed positions, they also went "asymmetric" and started using nasty things like old Soviet mines and then IEDs on an industrial scale.

It was only latterly that there was talk of Borneo and Malaya, but that was not until 2009, after Parry's time (he retired in 2008). By then, even the Septics were getting a bit dubious about British strategic wisdom and the brass were looking for something that might restore their credibility. Thus, briefly, the Far East campaigns became fashionable.

With not a great deal of jungle in Afghanistan, the brass might have been better off studying the campaigns in Aden and Cyprus, then Rhodesia and Bosnia, where land mines and IEDs were widely deployed and countermeasures were being developed. But our "immature" brass obviously had difficulty coping with more than one idea at the same time, so the lessons there went begging.

Eventually, our geniuses alighted on the military equivalent of putting men in front of vehicles with red flags, as way of dealing with IEDs, reasoning – if that is what it can be called – that the public was less concerned with the odd bod getting blown up, provided they weren't in Snatch Land Rovers, which the media might notice.

Then we got the US version of COIN, with Gen McChrystal articulating ideas about "take – hold - build", which have about as much relevance to Afghanistan as a spaghetti sandwich does to an eight-man bobsleigh. But, relieved from the responsibility of doing their own thinking by the Septics, our Brown Jobs have fallen in with a strategy which Adam Holloway complains is "fatally flawed".

This is the man who was less than impressed with the fun and games in Iraq and argues that it is time to seek deals with the hardcore Taliban leaders. Personally, I would suggest killing them – in very large numbers - and then bribing the survivors, once we have re-engineered their towns, demolished their walls and straightened their roads.

However, Holloway is on the right lines when he says, "We have to have a political settlement". For that, we need to listen to what people like Maharajakrishna Rasgotra have to say. He regards the current policy as "the march of folly", and offers his own ideas. Being a former Indian government minister, his views are neither practical nor trustworthy, but his preferred direction of travel is interesting.

Certainly, it is far more realistic than anything produced by our politicians, and far better than anything our brass have ever considered, not that that would be at all difficult. Given the revelations of late – combined with what we already knew – there are very few of our generals that we would be happy employing on road-crossing duties or as school dinner ladies.

COMMENT THREAD

A political own goal

2010-06-11T00:02:00.000+01:00

An unannounced visit by the Cleggeron leader to Afghanistan yesterday - intended to underline the improving security situation in the country - has partially backfired. "Call me Dave" was forced to cancel a visit to the Army's Shazhad forward operating base in Helmand.

This, we are told, followed two successive mobile phone intercepts, the first referring to a possible rocket attack on a helicopter and the second, intercepted close to the base, which suggested that a VIP was flying in.

A decision was thus taken by military commanders to call off the visit. The base is in an area which was previously an insurgent stronghold and which was heavily contested in the recent Operation Moshtarak offensive in central Helmand.

Dave's Chinook was diverted to Lashkar Gah where he met some British troops for a photo-opportunity and was forced to eat a hamburger with ketchup. He was said to be disappointed that the diversion gave the impression that the security situation was not good when to all intents and purposes the opposite was the case.

So there we are ... three helicopters – to our knowledge – have been lost to RPGs – two within one month. Others, including two RAF Chinooks, have been downed by Taliban gunfire. But hey! This gives a false impression about the security situation. Why it is though we are fed such drivel and why it is that The Boy feels the need to offer himself as hostage to fortune, Heaven only knows.

Despite his fond wish that the progress can be speeded up, this is unlikely to happen. Even US Gen McChrystal is admitting that operations were not going as planned and winning support from local leaders was proving "tougher than expected". In Marja, where the US Marines have claimed early success, residents see signs that the insurgents "have regained momentum" in recent weeks.

Where the US forces, with their vastly superior resources and larger reserves of manpower are having such problems, a BBC "expert" put the task facing Cameron as: "How do you withdraw in good order without giving the impression of defeat?" But, as it stands, Dave seems determined to set himself up for a fall. Building expectations of "progress" which the armed forces cannot deliver, he is confronted with not just with the impression but the actuality of defeat.

When that happens, it will be something of a political own goal. He could have distanced himself from the failures associated with the previous administration but has accepted responsibility for achieving success in a war he did not start, does not understand and is not temperamentally equipped to resolve. "This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity," he says. "This is not a war of occupation. This is a war of obligation."

Despite a second-rate defence team, a dysfunctional military, a fragile political base and empty coffers, Cameron has still fallen into the trap of casting himself as a (reluctant) war leader. This lack of acumen could well be his undoing, the failure which defines his short tenure as prime minister.

COMMENT THREAD

The changing of the narrative

2010-06-10T13:17:00.000+01:00

There is something interesting and profoundly important going on when, for the second day running, The Times gives over its front page to a story critical of British military efforts in Afghanistan, plus this story, this and this, making up three pages of coverage, plus another lead editorial on the subject.

The fact of the pieces and their critical line is as important as the detail of what they say – possibly more so. What we are seeing here is a changing of the narrative, or an attempt so to do. Given the low grade of defence journalism in this country, there is no expectation that the new narrative is going to be any better informed than the previous one, but at least it is different from the "underfunding" and "overstretch" mantras that have hitherto dominated the headlines.

Following on from my own piece yesterday, I'd all but forgotten this piece that I wrote in March, remarking on the power the narrative, and the difficulty in changing it.

But, in The Times attempt, at least now there is a grudging and belated recognition that there were "errors all the way down the chain of command". At last, we are getting some serious – if limited – discussion about failures in strategy, with talk of "arrogance in the field", "hubris disguised as confidence", "decisiveness trumping thoughtful caution" and the pursuit of tactical victories "sometimes to the detriment of strategic progress".

One should thus be heartened by the paper's call for "a review that takes in capability, the relationship between politics and military and the conventional wisdom of counter-insurgency", but it is precisely that which this and the rest of the British media has avoided for years, as the debate has raged on the other side of the Atlantic – recorded by our own Defence of the Realm.

And, of course, presiding over the failures in strategy in Afghanistan, from the very beginning until fairly recently, was everyone's poster child, the saintly General Dannatt. No review could take place without re-examining his role in the campaign and, when history comes to be written, his reputation will have to be heavily reconsidered. A lot of clever-dick commentators are going to have to eat humble pie, not that they ever do.

Of those, one should undoubtedly be Patrick Mercer, who has spouted more rubbish than enough, and been right at the forefront of the underfunding mantra. Yet this self-same "renta-mouth" is putting himself up for the chairmanship of the defence committee, saying of the Helmand failings: "I think there should be a very clear inquiry into why senior officers allowed this to happen."

Yet another should be James Arbuthnot, the previous chairman, who has said that if he was re-elected one of his tasks would be to investigate Afghanistan as part of a Strategic Defence Review. He says that The Times investigation would form a "very important crux of such an inquiry", yet this is the man who has consistently shown himself to be part of the problem and fatally compromised by having been a seriously inadequate procurement minister.

Yet, it is a measure of the wonderful "new politics" that the squeaky clean new parliament, given an opportunity to make a fresh start, has re-elected Arbuthnot as defence committee chairman. Committed to the status quo, and never one to pass up the opportunity to grovel to the military brass, here is a man who will ensure that the generals past and present are never brought to account, or even troubled by anything that might embarrass them. A more pathetic start, it would be hard to imagine.

But, with so many having bought into the earlier narrative, it was always going to be difficult to find anyone with clean hands. They will not be found in the military or politics and there are very few in the media, which has been entertaining itself at our expense. One of those few is Simon Jenkins who, in yesterday's Guardian argues for the complete abolition of the British military.

Given its overall incompetence, and the complete inability of the media and the political establishment to exercise any meaningful control over the bloated and useless military bureaucracy and the fantasies of its overpaid generals, it is very hard to disagree with Jenkins. His view may be rhetoric, but if it takes hold and gets the military establishment really worried, it will be no bad thing.

COMMENT THREAD

A bit bloody late

2010-06-09T17:46:00.000+01:00

I didn't realise how big The Times was running the Afghan story until I saw the full newspaper today – then to see that it was the main theme of the day, complete with the lead editorial headed: "Institutional Denial".

There, we are gravely told that: "The politicians have deserved criticism about Afghanistan. An investigation by The Times shows that senior military personnel cannot escape blame either." And, just to cement this in, we get a comment piece from Anthony Loyd who tells us that the findings:

... reverse much of the received wisdom that the Labour Government, stingy in every allocation of manpower, resource and equipment, spendthrift only in soldiers' lives, was solely responsible for the misfortunes endured by our Army in Helmand.

Well, excuse me! It may have been your "received wisdom", but it wasn't mine. In this blog and the sister blog, Defence of the Realm, I have consistently – and almost entirely on my own – been writing posts like this and many more about the inadequacy of our general staff and their roles in the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thus, while the media was having wet dreams about the saintly Dannatt, and the blogosphere and media alike – along with the Tory opposition and its claque - was chanting "under-resourced" and "over-stretch", I was telling a completely different story.

Even then, it was in April last year that I finally finished Ministry of Defeat which embodies much of what The Times is saying today, but also much, much more, about Iraq and Afghanistan.

And did The Times review the book? Apart from Thomas Harding of The Daily Telegraph, did any defence correspondent take a blind bit of notice of it, or bother to review it? Did any of the clever-dick political blogs which were sooooo voluble about the underfunding, etc., etc., have a look and change their thinking?

For months now, my publicist and publisher have been telling me that the book - which has actually done quite well despite the lack of publicity – was ahead of its time, running themes that are only now beginning to make an appearance, which people are now only beginning to recognise. They could have read it a year ago in the book, and years before that on the blogs. But they were far too grand and clever to do that.

Significantly, Michael White in The Guardian today notes how The Times is rewriting the political narrative. But he observes that the "interesting shift" may reflect a diminished enthusiasm for beating up elected politicians over defence policy when they are Tory, not Labour.

That, of course, is what it was really all about. The media, the political classes and the claque were not interested in the performance of the military, per se or what was really going wrong. The problems had a utility only in that they presented an opportunity to attack the Labour government. And if that meant supporting – and applauding – inadequate generals, while their troops died, so be it.

Says White, the refocus on professional errors is a useful corrective. The top brass has been unusually vocal in attacking Labour's military failures in office – think General Sir Richard Dannatt, whose advice seems to have been quietly shelved by the incoming government now that he's served his purpose as a high-profile defector from the ranks. Now its own role is being more closely examined.

Of course, it's a bit bloody late – too bloody late, some might say, and far too bloody late for the troops who died in shit kit because the generals had their heads up their arses.

So yes, I am angry – bloody angry. The time, the effort, the skill, and the risks taken by some really serious people in the background who kept me informed and told me what was really going on, went largely to waste - because what people really wanted was a stick to beat the government. And dead soldiers were as good a stick as any to exploit.

While a fundamentally unserious media played its games, men died unnecessarily. Too late were the failings of the generals realised - but they were not "realised" earlier because no one wanted to know. It was not politically convenient.

Britain's soldiery have had it bad these past seven years of war, writes Loyd. One of the burdens under which they labour was that: "among their generals lurk donkeys in disguise." "Carelessness, arrogance and a reluctance to learn from the mistakes of Iraq appear to have shadowed every step of the Army's planning for the Helmand mission."

As I say, a bit bloody late to start pointing that out now. Where were you four years ago?

COMMENT THREAD

Another one down

2010-06-09T12:10:00.000+01:00

NATO says a helicopter has been shot down in the Sangin district. Four troops have been killed. The Taliban claims responsibility.

The Times is reporting that the aircraft was a US Blackhawk, attempting to pick up a British casualty. It came under fire around midday over Forward Operating Base Jackson, near the British-held town of Sangin.

With others, the BBC is reporting that the aircraft was brought down with an RPG and that it crashed in the Sangin district bazaar.

This seems almost an exact re-run of the Mi-26 downing in Sangin last July. It too was brought down by an RPG as it was approaching FOB Jackson - in apparently much the same area.

The current incident follows the recent downing of a Sea King as it came in to land at a checkpoint in Nad-e Ali, also struck by an RPG. The hit was described at the time as a freak "lucky shot." Five soldiers were injured.

However, since the soldiers in this incident are American and it was a US helicopter that was lost - albeit in a British area of operation, coming to the aid of the British - the notoriously parochial British media is barely reporting it.

It would have been a different matter entirely if a British helicopter had been shot down, and four Brits killed - but there you go. Who are we to question the news values of the British media?

COMMENT THREAD

Statements of the obvious

2010-06-09T00:49:00.000+01:00

A quick comment on this piece in The Times is irresistible, especially in view of the post I wrote here.

In my piece, I remark on the parallels between the conduct of the French campaign in IndoChina and the current fight in Afghanistan, noting the propensity to under-estimate the enemy. With that observation in mind, we now read in The Times of a "two-month investigation" which includes interviews with 32 senior military, political and Civil Service figures.

It "reveals" that there was deep disquiet over the handling of the mission from the start, with top ranks within the MoD and other Whitehall departments accused of – in particular - "grossly underestimating the threat from the Taleban".

But you didn't need two months and 32 interviews to tell you that. It was obvious from the public statements of the players, the press reports and observations of tactics and equipments. And it was obvious years ago when we could see that the Taliban was losing the conventional battle and would turn to the IED as the weapon of choice.

Other failures claimed were, " ignoring warnings that planned troop numbers were inadequate" and "offering only the military advice they thought ministers wanted to hear", the latter often involving second-guessing the minister's preferences and getting them wrong – assuming the minister wanted to hear good news when, in fact, he was struggling to get unvarnished opinion.

Most damning though is the observation from a senior serving officer who asked not to be named. He said of the planning stage: "There was institutional ignorance and denial. We who had bothered to put a bit of work in and had done the estimate realised that we needed much more than we were being given."

Another source said that the military was pushing hard for the mission despite warnings that preparations were inadequate. "The advice to ministers grossly underestimated the risks," he said. "The few people who were doubters were either too cowardly or too cautious to say what they really thought."

That may be true, but only within the military. Outside the loop, there were people warning of the risks, and what was needed. But they were ignored and, years later, we get a popular newspaper making statements of the obvious. It is a pity, really, that it wasn't saying these things four years ago.

And yet, some people (pictured) still think we're winning. Could they possibly be right?

COMMENT THREAD

A "difficult" day

2010-06-08T06:55:00.000+01:00

Associated Press is reporting that twelve foreign troops were killed in Afghanistan yesterday in what it is calling the "deadliest day" this year.

Casualties included seven Americans, five of whom were killed in a single IED blast. Separately, a US civilian police trainer and his Nepalese security guard died in a "brazen suicide assault". One French and two Australian soldiers were killed. The nationality of the remaining two has not been specified, although the MoD is saying that no British troops were killed.

The Canadians (pictured) are counting their losses from a previous day, their total deaths now standing at 147 compared with 292 for the British and well over 1,000 for the US.

US Lt-Gen David Hurley was anxious not to overplay the significance of the numbers, telling reporters: "I think we're just seeing a hard day in theatre," he said. "There are a lot of troops in action, a lot going on at this present time, and this has just been a difficult day for us."

However, the brazen nature of the attacks has stunned observers. The American police trainer was killed when a team of three suicide bombers attacked the main gates of the police training centre in Kandahar. One bomber blew a hole in the outer wall, enabling the two others to rush inside.

US commanders are warning of more casualties as NATO forces gear up for a major operation to secure Kandahar, but the ferocity and persistence of the Taliban attacks bode ill for the continued operations.

This type of "targeted" suicide bombing is, of course, not new – but one previous appearance of the tactic should provide some warning. Contrary to popular belief, this is not confined to Muslim or even religious groups, and was seen in the late 40s and early 50s in French IndoChina, employed by the Communist Viet Minh.

Then as now, Western forces are not dealing with an "ordinary" enemy, one which would respond to the "normal" political calculus, or even extravagant casualty rates.

And nor is the optimism of ISAF forces at all reassuring. It is germane to note that, prior to its fall, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu had been the object of an unprecedented number of high level visits. Yet, as French Commander-in-Chief Gen Henri Navarre observed:

... not a single civilian or military authoritative person, including French or foreign ministers, or American generals ... ever to my knowledge, admitted any doubts before the attack on the ability of Dien Bien Phu to resist.

As before, one can rely on the premise that "everybody" can be wrong. What particularly marks that campaign was the dismissive treatment of the "amateur" general Vo Nguyen Giap, and the tendency to under-rate the capabilities of the Viet Minh. That gave the French in 1953 an uncomfortable number of "difficult" days and led to their eventual defeat.

More than fifty years later, we seem to be travelling the same path.

COMMENT THREAD

That amazing "own goal"

2010-06-04T00:02:00.000+01:00

In the not too distant future, when the Cleggeron administration crashes and burns, one of the key stresses that will have brought it down will be the totally unforced error made by David Cameron in adopting the previous government's Afghan policy and thus locking himself in to an unwinnable war.

Quite how politically crass this move really is can be seen from two similar articles, one in The Daily Telegraph and the other in The Guardian. The theme is identified by the headline from the latter, which tells us: "Afghan police failings fuelling Taliban recruitment, say UK army chiefs," painting "a devastating picture of the corrupt and ill-disciplined local police force."

What one has to appreciate is that the role of the Afghan police is absolutely pivotal to the success or otherwise of the current strategy. Not unless or until the police are able to take the load can we – according to the agreed doctrine – even think about withdrawal. But, not only do we have the British Army cast serious doubts about whether the force is at all capable, this comes on the back of the complaints by the US Forces in the New York Times earlier this week.

Then there is another piece, this one in the Washington Post, with a US commentary which notes: "Afghanistan Police: Still Corrupt After All These Years." The WAPO narrative runs as follows:

"The hardest nut for us to crack is to build faith in the institution of the police," said Haight, the regional commander. During home searches for weapons or insurgents, he said, Afghan police often "shake down the house like criminals." In terms of training and morale, he said, the police are about five years behind the army. "We have to show them what right behavior is, to secure the people instead of being corrupt and victimizing them," he said.

This in turn elicits the comment: "It's not unreasonable to wonder why, if the culture hasn't been amenable to change after years of intensive efforts, why it ever will." But the "killer point" here is the date – 8 March 2009. More than a year ago, exactly the same things were being said that are being aired right now.

In the current Guardian piece, we get Brigadier James Cowan, commander of 11 Brigade stating that the police are "most often cited as why there is a problem and why people joined the Taliban", the problem being compounded by Taliban propaganda. Taliban fighters wore Afghan police uniforms as they stole money and possessions from innocent people at checkpoints.

Afghan security forces appear in many ways to be as much part of the problem as the solution, Cowan says, and his comments are echoed by Lt-Col Roly Walker, commander 1 Bn Grenadier Guards, with an added twist. He says the Taliban exploited grievances to "incite insurrection" but then adds that the Taliban are not the biggest obstacle to success. Rather they are "consequences of much deeper social and political grievances".

And that is very much the case, all of which stacks up to the fact that Cameron has indeed shackled himself to a policy that cannot succeed, no matter how much resource he throws at it or political capital he invests in it. If he is going through the motions, despite having told parliament (and through that the nation) that he would fully support the military, then he has the worst of all possible worlds – a failed policy for which he has accepted full responsibility.

You don't get much more crass than that. Yet, bizarrely, the Tory Boy Blog believes this is an achievement. You can see how the Tories managed to win the election so convincingly.

COMMENT THREAD

Cameron's War

2010-06-02T19:34:00.000+01:00

Although much hailed before the event, getting information on yesterday's meeting of Cameron's national security committee is proving extraordinarily difficult. All we have so far is a very limited statement from a Downing Street spokesman, telling us that: "There were wide-ranging, intensive and productive discussions during the extended session on this, the Government's top foreign policy priority."

"The Prime Minister and the NSC," we are also told, "expressed their great admiration and support for our troops serving in Afghanistan and paid tribute to the essential contribution that they and their civilian colleagues make. The NSC will now continue its work to ensure that the UK does all it can to support the agreed Nato strategy in Afghanistan to succeed."

Separately, we have a report in The Guardian which makes the claim – attributed to officials - that Britain is putting pressure on Afghanistan to assume full responsibility for its own security as soon as possible.

If that is true – and there is no reason why it should not be – it quite possibly represents the ultimate example of hope triumphing over experience, there being any number of accounts which attest to the incompetence of Afghan security forces.

The latest of these comes in the New York Times which describes the Interior Ministry's most promising force, which has been "undercut by drug use, petty corruption and, at times, a lack of commitment in the face of the ordinary hardships and duties of uniformed life."

This piece deserves to be read in full but particularly relevant is the observation that many of the police from the force profiled were Tajik, and did not speak Pashto, southern Afghanistan's dominant language. Unsurprisingly, one of them complained: "Nobody can find a lot of information about the Taliban."

What, of course, this destroys is the facile idea that the southern, predominantly Pashtun population is ever going to accept the rule of Kabul, bolstered as it is – and has always been historically – by the northern tribes of an entirely different ethnicity.

Thus Simon Jenkins is telling us in The Guardian that Cameron should take the opportunity of the switch in Helmand from British to US control to admit the obvious and start to plan how best to leave. It is idle to pretend, he writes, that Britain's 2006 expedition to bring Helmand under the control of the Kabul regime has anything but failed.

Yet, rather than take that opportunity, the Cameron stance has been to support the last administration's policy and, as he did during the session allocated to PMQs in parliament today, commit to providing the military with "whatever they need", thereby effectively taking ownership of the conflict. It may have started off as Blair's war, then to become Brown's war, but it has now undergone a glacially smooth transition, on its way to becoming Cameron's war.

There is no obvious political reason why the Cleggeron leader should so recklessly assume responsibility for this conflict – other than, perhaps, he has been unduly influenced by today's leader in The Daily Telegraph, which intones that "tangible results" are "desperately needed" to reassure an increasingly sceptical public that the war is winnable - an outcome which only that newspaper can believe is possible.

"Providing clear and unequivocal support for the military effort would be a good start," the paper says, advice which Cameron seems to have taken, unwittingly falling into a trap from which he will find it difficult to extract himself.

As a harbinger, the significance of which it is unlikely he would understand, yesterday we learned of the death of another Danish soldier, since identified as 22-year-old Private Sophia Bruun. She was killed close to Bridzar military base in Helmand, after a Piranha armoured personnel carrier was hit by an IED.

The point that will escape Cameron is that this vehicle type was intended to be the base for the FRES utility vehicle which, given a choice, the Army would have preferred to the Mastiff and other protected vehicles. Affording the Army "unequivocal support" may prove to be unwise, given that it most often has no real idea what it really wants and, in any event, should be given what it needs rather than what it wants.

In return, however, the one thing Cameron need not expect is "tangible results", other than seeing the number of deaths climb from today's figure of 290 – with yet another Royal Marine killed by a bomb in Sangin – to 300 in the very near future. For his first performance in the PMQ slot today, he had to read out three names. Already, he has another for next week's list and soon enough he will be dealing with the torrent of media "celebrating" that macabre third century.

By then it will truly be Cameron's war. And if he makes 400, it will be the only thing he "achieves" from it.

COMMENT THREAD

You can't blame the Messenger

2010-06-01T14:06:00.000+01:00

The Cleggeron administration has at least provided one useful service in publishing the Civil Service "rich list" – the names of the 172 senior civil servants who earn more than £150,000 a year.

Included in that number (although not exactly a civil servant) is CDS Jock Stirrup, one of 22 MoD officials earning more than £150,000. He is currently on the pay band £240,000 - £249,999. This, of course, does not include his perks which include full-time servants, limousine and chauffeur provided at public expense.

On current performance, however, Stirrup is being paid probably ten times what he is worth, not least as a greater part of his responsibility – the campaign in Helmand - has just been removed and handed to a US general, Maj Gen Richard Mills, of the USMC.

Whether that will lead to any improvement in the conduct of the campaign is moot, although given the objective declared by British theatre spokesman Maj Gen Gordon Messenger, it is unlikely that it could make things worse.

Messenger's view of how to win, as expressed to the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme, comes straight out of the Janet & John Book of Counterinsurgency (budget edition). It is all about providing security, he says, which is the "bedrock" on which a peaceful Afghanistan would be built. "Ultimately," he prattles, "the key to this is the allegiance of the population. When the population demonstrate their allegiance to the Afghan government, we will have done our job."

The funny thing is, you could have given this man a job with US public affairs in Vietnam in the 1960s and he would have been saying much the same things. But, with a dismal and highly-overpaid boss like Stirrup, even now you can't blame the Messenger.

COMMENT THREAD

Going through the motions

2010-05-30T14:49:00.001+01:00

The resignation of David Laws would be big news at any time, but the homosexual relationship gives it an extra edge. The saga of "poofters in power" – as it was characterised by one of my correspondents – has a special fascination in the Westminster village, which is far more interested in who is buggering whom than it is the general proposition that the population as a whole is being right royally buggered by the political classes.

Needless to say, the extravagant coverage being given to the affairs of Mr Laws has pushed other issues further down the agenda and excluded other items completely, not least by the absurd proposition that the low-grade-Laws will somehow "bounce back" once this bit of local difficulty has been quietly forgotten.

One of those issues which has doubtless got less coverage than it might is the vexed matter of Afghanistan. But then the unnecessary slaughter of (mainly) heterosexual young males through the cupidity, incompetence and manic stupidity of our political classes – willingly aided and abetted by the military itself - is of very little importance compared with the weighty matters of state to which the likes of Mr Iain Dale wish to draw our attention.

Nevertheless, some coverage has survived as, it appears, "Call me Dave" is this week convening a "secret summit" of military experts, ministers and Tory MPs on the war in Afghanistan. It is to be held at Chequers and will also be attended by members of the new National Security Council, including NickNick, Hague and little Georgie Osborne.

Also in attendance though will be (or so we are told) Conservative MP Adam Holloway, a former soldier who served in Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He has publicly suggested that the mission is on the brink of failure, and warned that the heavy presence of coalition troops is "aggravating the problem" in the area.

Another "outsider" will be Rory Stewart, a new Tory MP and former British Army officer, described as having "extensive experience of the conflict". Although rather too full of himself for some tastes, he too has voiced his concern about the mission, suggesting it is doomed, and has publicly questioned the government's key argument for Britain's continuing involvement in Afghanistan - that it reduces the terrorism threat in Britain - describing it as "ridiculous".

Coincidentally (not) we have seen in the media a raft of what could loosely be called "strategy" pieces, the latest being from Denis MacShane in The Observer, who repeats an earlier call to bring the troops home.

The MacShane thesis is that our soldiers have shed enough blood and the strategy of sending patrols out to be shot at by the Taliban is needlessly costing the lives of British troops. Thus, he argues that it is "time to stop the blood sacrifice of our young soldiers in Afghanistan," noting that Britain has no general, no "master of strategy" with the 21st-century vision to stop the blood-letting as officers and men are sent as IED fodder.

War is too important to be left to generals, he says, then asserting – almost certainly correctly – that ministers past and present have flinched from thinking strategically. Instead, far too much has been left to the generals. Says MacShane:

Every six months, a new commander is sent from London to head the fighting soldiers in Afghanistan. These brigadiers rotate, so that, instead of fighting one six-year war, we have fought 12 six-month wars, so that future red tabs can punch their tickets. The can-do, will-do power-point style of the British army impresses politicians, and every visiting minister and journalist is in awe of these tough, sun-burnt, dedicated professionals.

It is hard to say that they and their generals are wrong, but the time has come to put parliament and elected ministers in charge. The pro-war tabloids say they are backing our boys. They are not: they are backing the generals. Officers and men ready to criticise the campaign have no voice.

The problem with that line is that putting "elected ministers" in charge means giving 13th Century Fox and William Hague their head. Yet nothing they have so far offered gives any confidence that things will be better than they were under Labour.

On the other hand, leaving the campaign to generals means more of the same, with precious little being done about the "blood sacrifice". This is largely regarded as tolerable - and necessary to keep the new kit coming and the funds flowing. After all, if the Brass was not allowing the Taliban to spread a sample of its finest in pieces across the plains and hills of Helmand, politicians like "Call me Dave" might actually start asking what the Army is for – and that would never do.

Interestingly, Charles Moore attempted that on Saturday – sort of. Along the way, he remarks that "the current truth" is that Britain's effort in Afghanistan is not working.

But the Grand Charles, who so often dines with the great and the good that he has long lost touch with reality, believes the failure arises because it (the effort) "is not granted political, developmental or military freedom of manoeuvre."

His answer is to ditch Stirrup (who has been a disappointment, not least as one of the few senior officers with any experience of counterinsurgency) and appoint a new CDS. "One hopes that rumours that Mr Cameron would rather appoint a soldier fresh for the task are true," says Charles. This man, though, is still locked in the claustrophobically narrow world of the military perspective, looking for a British military figure akin to General David Petraeus who can lead our forces to the promised land. He will search in vain ... this is not a military problem.

At least MacShane is thinking in geopolitical terms, arguing that "diplomats and development aid should be redirected to Pakistan and India, as well as to China and Iran, to remove the widespread feeling among Muslim communities that this is Kipling's west again seeking to control the lives of people whose customs and needs they do not understand." And thus does he focus on the "burning issue of Kashmir", which is one of the keys which will unlock the Afghan conflict.

The one thing that the Tories - and especially the Grand High Tories like Charles Moore - don't do though is think. Anyone who ever attempts such a perilous process is quickly exorcised from the party ranks. And that is why you have Con Coughlin noting that they have already sold the pass, with an analysis piece headed: "We will never defeat the Taliban if they think we're going home".

Politicians both sides of the Atlantic, says Coughlin, are desperate to escape from the quagmire that is Afghanistan. Yet paradoxically, the only way we stand a chance of extricating ourselves is by sending a clear and unequivocal message that we are going to stay the course, he writes.

Well, we can do that but, frankly, no one would believe it, least of all the Taliban. In that sense, Liam Fox, in saying that he wants to speed up the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan, is only articulating the common objective. The question really is the terms – whether we accept humiliating defeat barely dressed up as victory, as we did in Iraq, or whether we hold out and engineer a more plausible fig-leaf to cover our humiliating defeat.

When one looks at today's newspapers, however – and follows through with the TV news if one is mad enough to do so – the over-riding impression is that no-one really gives a damn. We go though the ritual wailing and rending of clothes as body parts are returned in flag-bedecked coffins borne by highly polished limousines but you can see that the real interest is in the "poofters in power" soap opera. If we declared "victory" tomorrow and walked out the next day, few would even notice and fewer still would argue the toss.

Coughlin says we are giving "the unfortunate impression that the West is rapidly losing its stomach for the fight." In fact we lost it years ago and all we are doing is going through the motions.

Tragically, we will have to go through those motions for a while longer, pretending we are serious about fighting this war. That will last for as long as it takes for "Call me Dave" to get round to making some meaningless but profound statements, all to save some notional "face" and make it look as if he is in charge - although in actuality, he will be doing whatever Mr Obama tells him to do.

It is interesting how wars are often much easier to start than they are to stop, and this one is no different. The "blood sacrifice" will have to continue because no one knows how to stop it more quickly, or cares enough to try. But then, in the grander scheme of things, a few more body parts in a few more coffins won't make any difference and it is clearly not worth any great effort trying to safe a few lives. The show must go on, doncha know.

COMMENT THREAD

So where are they?

2010-05-28T13:58:00.000+01:00

A coroner has said there has been an "unacceptable level of mortality" among bomb disposal experts working in Afghanistan.

Coroner Stuart Fisher made the comments as he returned a verdict of unlawful killing at an inquest in Lincoln into the death of Captain Daniel Shepherd. Capt Shepherd was killed as he defused an improvised explosive device by hand in Helmand province in July 2009. The coroner said it was critical that remote devices were used on bombs.

Well, blow me down with a feather! That's exactly what I said in July 2009, just after Capt Sheherd's death was reported. And if I can see it, from my desk in Bradford, and a Coroner – on hearing expert evidence – can see it (and recommend it), where are all these military experts and on-the-spot defence correspondents? Why couldn't they see it?

Further, I very much doubt whether the Coroner had the Buffalo in mind, as a local coroner would know nothing of this equipment unless he had been told about it. And the one thing the Army seems to be extremely good at during inquests is keeping quiet about the availability of life-saving equipment, and the lethal inadequacies of its current systems and procedures.

There is also always going to be the smart-alec who will say that the Buffalo cannot solve every problem. In fact, there seems to be a remarkable sub-strain of military stupidity which asserts that, because one piece of equipment cannot resolve all problems, it should be used for none at all.

But the fact is that the Buffalo has a proven record in saving lives – it is ideal for investigating suspect IEDs which might otherwise kill bomb disposal operators. We should have ordered them in 2005 (or earlier). The Army didn't, and it wasn't until November 2008 that an order was finally placed.

But that was 18 months ago. In the interim, we have heard nothing, and there is little indication of when these life-saving machines are going to go into service. Where are they, and how long is it going to take to get them into action?

And why aren't all these clever, knowledgeable defence correspondents agitating for their introduction, or are they still waiting for their Army minders to tell them what to think? This kit has been around, in US hands, since 2003 ... for SEVEN years. How long is it going to take before some bright journo actually notices that we are still using men with metal detectors to do the job that should be done with machines?

COMMENT THREAD

Dog should eat dog

2010-05-28T00:38:00.002+01:00

Rather amusingly, The Guardian is letting Monbiot off his leash to have a go at The Times, telling the world that its "exclusive" tale on EU climate targets is "gibberish".

Although Moonbat is largely a free agent, there must be an element of policy involved here, as most newspaper editors are reluctant to allow attacks on other journals. The view is taken that "dog shall not eat dog" in an informal arrangement that binds together the media as a self-serving (and mutually supporting) club.

In that sense, it is good to see Moonbat break ranks – even if one cannot agree with all he writes. Climate change aside, another good place to start would be the defence coverage, breaking into the low-grade and ill-informed coverage that we see all too often. And, once again, The Times would be a suitable target, with a story that could easily qualify as "gibberish".

The headline claim of this story – which sounds so terribly plausible – is that the MoD "has spent £207 million on an armoured vehicle that has yet to leave the drawing board, despite seven years of development." This, it tells us, is the Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) which "was supposed to provide soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with better protection against roadside bombs but its development has dragged on and costs have continued to rise."

Here one must admire the skill of the journalist, David Robertson, in getting so many things wrong in such a short passage. Firstly, while the MoD might have spent £207 million on FRES, the very name should warn the unwary journalist to be careful.

The key is in the last letter of the acronym, the "S", standing for "system". FRES is not an armoured vehicle, but a system – one which is extremely complex, sophisticated and innovative. Agree with it or not, the overall procurement budget is provisionally set at £16 billion and, for what is supposed to be part of a revolution in military affairs, the sum of £207 million so far spent is relatively modest.

Secondly, FRES vehicles were never intended to give protection against roadside bombs – neither in Iraq nor Afghanistan. The whole concept was of a lightly armoured, air-portable force which relied on advanced sensors and stand-off weapons to neutralise threats, rather than weight of armour. In fact, it is largely the IED which has so far scuppered the FRES concept.

So keen is The Times to develop its theme of "waste", however, that it then drags in the mine and IED resistant Mastiffs and Ridgebacks, noting that the MoD has spent more than £1 billion on new armoured vehicles such as these, but "these are seen as temporary solutions and FRES was meant to be the long-term answer and become the backbone of the Army’s vehicle fleet."

This is an issue we have rehearsed many times – for instance here - and while it is true that the Army originally sought to make the mine protected and FRES vehicles an either/or issue, they have emerged as entirely separate categories, each with their own distinct operational niches. The Times is offering a distorted and incorrect view.

Interestingly, the paper then goes to the MoD for a view on FRES and then, separately, to 13th Century Fox, as if he was still a member of the opposition. Dr Fox has been firmly in favour of FRES – wanting it introduced more quickly – so he tells us that: "The whole FRES programme is just another example of a procurement programme going over time and over budget. This is yet another reason why the procurement process needs radical reform that only a new government can provide."

And there lies the final inadequacy of a wholly inadequate piece. Where there are indeed problems with FRES, these are not primarily procurement failures. There are serious definitional problems, which will continue as the Army consistently fails to work out what equipment it really needs. If Dr Fox does not understand that – and he mostly doesn't – only the ignorance of The Times is going to get him off the hook.

Unfortunately, on that he can almost certainly rely – unless the media grow some and start picking apart some of the garbage such as this piece represents.

COMMENT THREAD

Thirteenth Century Fox

2010-05-24T18:07:00.000+01:00

Politically, for the period that British troops remain in Afghanistan, it is going to be an interesting time. We are going to see a Conservative defence team, which in opposition specialised in low-grade sniping, now exposed to its own medicine, as unhappy events unfold.

What would have been a classic example of this is the resignation today of Colonel Bob Seddon, the principal ammunition technical officer of the Royal Logistics Corps. He has decided to call it a day over his concerns that cuts have left his team - which deals with the threat of IEDs in Afghanistan – "overstretched and undermanned".

Pre-election, then shadow defence secretary Liam Fox would have had a field day, condemning the inadequacies of the government. Now he represents the government, however, Fox is having to promise to remedy the inadequacies of his predecessors. He is now, effectively, on notice, and further problems with ATO shortages will, in due course, be laid at his door.

This, of course, is a game Fox cannot win. There will always be deficiencies emerging somewhere in the order of battle as our forces continue to engage with a relentless enemy. Of those deficiencies, Fox will have little direct knowledge – until they are brought to his attention – but, having been so keen to hold his predecessor responsible for every defect, will now find himself similarly in the hot seat.

So far, Fox has not made a good start of it, having incurred the wrath of the Afghan government during a weekend visit, after describing Afghanistan as a "broken 13th-century country". A senior Afghan government source said: "His view appears to be that Afghanistan has not changed since the 13th century and it implies that Afghanistan is a tribal and medieval society."

If that is indeed Fox's view, it says little for his broader understanding of the politics of the region, but this should come as no surprise. On this and many other things, he shows every indication of having learned absolutely nothing during his period in waiting.

From his privileged position as defence shadow, Fox has had every opportunity to explore the Afghan crisis at length and, had his understanding developed at all, he would undoubtedly be thinking along the lines of Denis MacShane, one of the few to understand the malign role of India in the conflict.

"We cannot keep on sending British soldiers to die in the will-'o-the-wisp search for an ultimate military victory," says MacShane. "Instead of warcraft we need statecraft and that must involve a stronger relationship with Pakistan. There has been much talk about Pakistan and the solution to Afghanistan. But there will be no solution in Pakistan until India changes its strategic approach in the area."

Alongside foreign secretary William Hague, however, the Conservative leadership – MacShane asserts – is totally India-obsessed, which leaves Fox's thinking undeveloped and superficial.

And, if his strategic thinking is lacking, so too is his response to local issues such as perceived shortages. Tonight's Panorama documentary may be a case in point, where Christina Schmid, widow of Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, complains that her husband, who was killed by an IED in Sangin, was "flaking" with exhaustion on the day he died because of demands being made on him and his elite team due to staff shortages.

Taking them at face value, Fox has no choice but to respond to such complaints by promising to make good the shortages. But, had he been more conscientious in his research, he might have learned that there were alternative and less labour-intensive way of doing things, than currently undertaken by the military, which could square the circle – providing better military effect at less cost and loss of life.

Crucially though, where over the weekend there emerged what appeared to be a split between Fox and development secretary Andrew Mitchell, a more rational approach by Fox could have had the two ministers singing from the same hymn sheet.

The essential issue here is that, for many of the intractable military problems in the British area of operations, there are no pure military solutions. With such solutions are being sought, in vain, this gave Fox the opening to offer alternatives, such as the tried and tested engineering solutions which have served others so well.

Such an approach would have put Fox on the same wavelength as Mitchell, but instead has him creating his own hostages to fortune, with his current promise that the new government will "do everything we can to ensure that, whatever you are asked to do, you are properly, fully equipped to do so, to maximise your chance of success and minimise the risk to you."

That is a promise which Fox cannot keep – it will always be the case that there could have been something more which could have been done while, on the other hand, nothing Fox has in mind by way of strategy would offer any chance of success. He has already squandered multiple opportunities, to the extent that history has perhaps already marked Thirteenth Century Fox down for failure, before he has even got properly into gear.

COMMENT THREAD

Party political games

2010-03-12T13:49:00.003Z

The heads of the Armed Forces cannot escape their share of the blame if soldiers do not have the right equipment, writes Vernon Bogdanor in today's edition of The Times. He is not popular for saying so if the limited number of comments are any guide, but he is right. It is about time somebody said it in a mainstream newspaper and, despite other calls on my time, I felt impelled to post an analysis.

Writing under the headline, "Generals must keep their noses out of politics", Bogdanor is responding to that "disingenuous" remark from Lord Guthrie on 6 March that sparked off a major row, culminating in the jibe from David Cameron last Wednesday during PMQs - see video below.

In an attempt to explain the background, however, Bogdanor displays the usual MSM trait of carrying out shoddy research and only getting half the story. He gets a number of facts seriously wrong – actually weakening the very case he seeks to argue.

Thus, intones the great man, "In July 2006 the rising threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq prompted the MoD to order new patrol vehicles to add to their fleet of Snatch Land Rovers." He continues:

Many in the ministry favoured the Mastiff, based on a new mine-resistant design, but the Army argued for more Vector vehicles, which gave less protection but better all-terrain performance. They did not, at that stage, expect IEDs to become the biggest threat in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The cost of the two vehicles was roughly the same. A compromise was reached, with some of each being ordered.

The errors (and omissions) in this short passage are manifest. Firstly, as we know, the IED threat in Iraq had been rising since early 2005 and the Army had done very little about it, continuing to send men out in poorly protected Snatch Land Rovers. And even by mid-June, it had done nothing to seek a replacement in Iraq.

Secondly, and crucially, the issue was raised publicly in June 2006, whence the government's initial response – prompted by the Army - had been to defend the Snatch. It argued strenuously against "mine protected" vehicles, flatly declaring that their size, their (lack of) mobility and their aggressive profile ruled them out for use in Iraq.

Party Political Games from ClimateGate2009 on Vimeo.

The Army view was articulated clearly through Lord Drayson, then defence procurement minister, who told the House of Lords on 12 June 2006:

... I do not accept that Snatch Land Rovers are not appropriate for the role. We must recognise the difference between protection and survivability. It is important that we have the trade-offs that we need for mobility. The Snatch Land Rover provides us with the mobility and level of protection that we need.

At the time, we were arguing for the RG-31, this being one of the smallest of the well protected vehicles then available. This was ruled out by Drayson, who declared:

We have looked at the RG-31 alongside a number of alternatives for our current fleet and concluded that the size and profile did not meet our needs. Size is important in the urban environment. The RG-31 cannot access areas that Snatch Land Rovers can get to.

Our riposte was this post demonstrating that, while there were undoubtedly areas the RG-31 could not go, there were very many that it could. With that, the secretary of state, then Des Browne, took a hand, and ordered a review of armoured vehicle provision. From this emerged the Mastiff.

The point that Bogdanor misses is that the Army actively opposed the Mastiff. It did not want what it called a "stop-gap", preferring to hold out for the family of medium weight armoured vehicles under the FRES programme. It did not want to be saddled – or so it thought – with specialist vehicles, suitable for one theatre only, also fearing that their purchase would prejudice the FRES acquisition.

Only when CDS Jock Stirrup sided with Des Browne did the Army relent and agree, reluctantly, to accept Mastiffs. The "compromise" was that more Vectors would be bought, to be used in Afghanistan where their supposedly better off-road performance would enable them to replace the Snatch. The Army, effectively made acceptance of the Mastiff conditional on it being given more Vectors. Their price, incidentally, was half that of the Mastiff, but it still meant £100 million was being spent on the vehicles.

As for the Army not expecting, at that stage, "IEDs to become the biggest threat in Afghanistan as well as Iraq," as Bogdanor avers, this is probably the case.

But it also represents a very serious error on the part of the Army, which failed to see that which was obvious, and which had happened in every previous campaign, from Oman, Aden and Cyprus, through to Bosnia and Iraq – that when insurgents failed to prevail against conventional forces, they go "asymmetric", using the mine and the IED. So obvious was it that the Army was wrong that, on 22 June 2006, Ann Winterton asked the Defence Minister in the House:

As our forces appear to be winning the firefights in Afghanistan, does he expect those who oppose our troops there and in other theatres to revert to the use of improvised explosive devices? If so, what vehicles are our forces to be equipped with to counter the threat?

There was no satisfactory answer given, but as Bogdanor writes in his piece, the Mastiff proved to give excellent protection against IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq and was good value for money. The Vector, he writes, proved to be a liability that the MoD is now seeking to phase out – although the vehicles even now are supposed to have been withdrawn.

With that though, Bogdanor comes to the right conclusion. "Getting the right equipment for Afghanistan is more complex than simply handing over money or giving the military what it asks for," he writes, adding: "Decisions on the defence budget are taken jointly by politicians, officials and the heads of the Armed Services. None should seek to evade responsibility for decisions jointly taken."

In terms, however, technical decisions about vehicle types are taken by the military, with advice from technical civil servants and others. Ministers cannot be expected to make those decisions and only in exceptional circumstances would a minister consider over-ruling the supposed experts. But, in this case, Des Browne did – but not to withhold equipment. Rather, he forced equipment on an unwilling Army which had done its level best to block it.

It then ill-behoves the likes of Guthrie, and many more like him, to accuse the prime minister of not providing for the military's needs – especially as this scenario was repeated again and again, with helicopters, where a cheaper, immediately available option was rejected in favour of a more expensive model later, UAVs and much else.

Bognador goes on to make the point that the Armed Forces must remain politically neutral. To do otherwise would do lasting damage to the relationship between government and the Armed Services.

But there is a more immediate point. The Service Chiefs, past and recent, are indeed playing political games, not least to cover for their own errors and misjudgements. In so doing though, they are being aided and abetted – and used – by the Conservative party, most recently David Cameron at PMQs.

This is a serious political error. In opposition – especially against an unpopular government prosecuting an unpopular war – it may confer a short-term political advantage but, in office, the Conservatives are prone to the same type of attack from Service Chiefs if they decide to abjure political neutrality. And, of equal concern, in effectively conspiring with the military to allow egregious errors to be concealed, the responsibility for them diverted to the politicians, they set the scene for their own downfall. It is tactically inept.

Most of all though, it is Parliament's job to expose error, waste and inefficiency, wherever it might lie, and to force measures that will prevent – as far as can be – recurrences. Such matters are far too important to be hijacked for party political games, yet that was what Cameron was doing on Wednesday – playing games. We, and the troops who serve in our name, deserve better.

COMMENT THREAD

A thinking General

2010-01-19T00:51:00.006Z

If one equips more for the type of conflict we are actually having to fight, while significantly reducing investment in higher-end war-fighting capability, suddenly one can buy an impressive amount of "kit". So says General Sir David Richards, speaking to the IISS yesterday. He adds: "One can buy a lot of UAVs or Tucano aircraft for the cost of a few JSF and heavy tanks."

If I had a mind, I could link to all the pieces written on this blog, which said the same thing, going back many years – but try this, written in March 2007 and then again in April 2009 - when we specifically mentioned Tucanos, for the umpteenth time.

However, to have a CGS tell us that "hi-tech weapons platforms are not a good way to help stabilise tottering states" it is music to our ears, especially when he adds, "nor might their cost leave us any money to help in any other way - any more than they impress opponents equipped with weapons costing a fraction. We must get this balance right."

Despite our enthusiasm for a General who is finally talking our language, there is still though a sense of weariness when we read: "...too much emphasis is still placed on 'exquisite' and hugely expensive equipment." Been there, done, that one – a tired, somewhat disillusioned blogger. But now a General is saying it - years later - so it must be right.

Paraphrasing the man, and cutting out some of the impenetrable jargon that the military feel compelled to use, we then see him saying: "...the type of conflict we are fighting requires mass - numbers - whether 'boots on the ground', riverine and high speed littoral warships, or UAVs, transport aircraft and helicopters. And that must come at the expense of "high-end" kit.

We could argue with a little of that, but we won't. The point is that the right kit for the sort of wars we are fighting today is a lot cheaper than the high end kit, so we can afford much more. For the price of one JSF, we could have something like 16 Tucanos. For one FRES utility vehicle, we can have eight top-range MRAPs.

Richards, however, does not just talk about kit. He stresses the need for high quality, adaptable personnel and also talks about the nature of warfare. "Conflict today, is principally about and for people – hearts and minds on a ass scale," he says. "At the press of a button, an embittered diaspora can be inflamed with a mission and furnished with the knowledge of how to construct a cheap but hugely effective weapon."

We've aid that as well, pointing out how insurgents have converted the internet into a weapon of war. Richards seems now to recognise that - I'm not sure Dannatt even knew what the internet was.

Dealing with wars fought through internet proxies, the General says, requires a cultural shift in our understanding of and approach to conflict. We must, therefore, respond "more ruthlessly" to ensure that our armed forces are appropriate and relevant to the context in which they will operate rather than the one they might have expected to fight in previous eras.

Here, he is certainly right, but I'm not sure that the military could cope with the type of culture you need to take on the internet "bandits". The sort of person who could best fight that war is not the sort of person that would find a home in this man's Army. He may wish for a culture change, but he is unlikely to get it, and wouldn't like it if he did.

Even then, what he has said – for a CGS – is extremely daring. The blue jobs – dark and light – will already be plotting their counter-moves, while the defence industry will be sharpening up their lobbying, to make sure the big bucks keep coming their way.

Richards tries to head them off, pre-empting the squawks that will have it that this would leave us defenceless. "Can we take the risk?" he offers rhetorically. Well, he says, we have to take risk somewhere or run the far greater one of trying with inadequate resources to be all things to all conflicts and failing to succeed in any.

Good answer that – at least according to his nostrum, we have a chance of success in one of our ventures, which would make a change.

Nevertheless, Richards is not proposing that we get rid of all our more traditional military capability. It is still needed to deter a war fought by such means from becoming an asymmetric attraction to an enemy and because the requirement to fight and win hard battles will not disappear.

But what he does do is question the scale. Future wars of mass manoeuvre are more likely to be fought though the minds of millions looking at computer and television screens than on some modern equivalent of the Cold War's North German plain.

Thus, we have to prioritise and take perceived risk somewhere, says the man. We must move away from accepting today's defence budget, carved up broadly as it always has been, as a "norm" and establish what we need before we establish what we can afford. If, as is likely, there is a gap, we can then have this recognised as a risk which the government is – or is not - prepared to carry.

Then, in a necessary but nonetheless statement of the blindingly obvious, he tells us that, to determine what we need, we must firstly establish what UK interests are, how we can best protect those interests, and what we need to do so. These interests can be opportunities to exploit or threats to resist, he says.

Taking inter-service rivalry head-on, he asserts that this is not a matter of where the balance of investment should lie between the Services. Rather this is about ensuring we achieve a balance, across all three and with allies, between our ability to fight a traditional war of air, maritime and ground kinetic manoeuvre and being able to conduct a far more difficult one amongst, with and for the People.

This re-balancing could result in more ships, armoured vehicles and aircraft not less. But they will not necessarily be those we currently plan on. In sum, he tells us, we must find the vision and the resources needed to re-balance out of being prepared for old conflict and into being prepared for new.

Making these choices is the basis of command, says Richards. Whether as a platoon commander or chief of the Army, you can't have everything and will have to choose if you are to succeed.

On that, he is right. You can't please everyone, and you cannot – with our defence budget, or indeed any amount of money, prepare for every possible eventuality. But, with that speech, Richards is going to upset more than a few.

His primary audience, of course, is the incoming administration, which one assumes will be led by David Cameron. Whether there is anyone on his team with the brains to understand what Richards is saying, and with the determination and skill to take on the ranks of vested interests, is moot. But at least we have a General who is in part living up to the description on his tin – he was advertised as a "thinking general", and he is certainly that.

Give him a few more years and he might get round to understanding that, even with his bold ideas, he is still going to lose the war in Afghanistan. The answer to that lies in high politics, way above his pay grade, and beyond even the ken of our revered leader, Gordon Brown.

But, at least with General Richards at the helm, we might be spending less on obscenely expensive kit and, with more appropriate kit in theatre, we might lose a few less men before we have to pull out, proclaiming our "victory", the word "defeat" – as in Iraq – having been abolished. For that, at least, we should be grateful.

The pic, of course, is a Tucano. When we see a couple of squadrons of those flying in RAF colours, in Afghanistan, I'll know the General is winning his battle.

COMMENT THREAD

I think we said that

2009-12-10T01:10:00.003Z

Referring to the daily stream of truck convoys that bring supplies into the landlocked nation, Hilary Clinton said to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"You know, when we are so dependent upon long supply lines - as we are in Afghanistan, where everything has to be imported -- it's much more difficult than it was in Iraq, where we had Kuwait as a staging ground.

You offload a ship in Karachi. And by the time whatever it is - you know, muffins for our soldiers' breakfast or anti-IED equipment - gets to where we're headed, it goes through a lot of hands. And one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money. That has nothing to do with President Karzai."

Yup! That's precisely what we said on 3 September and then again on 13 September of this year , on the blog and in the Booker column.

Note: "And one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money." More troops, more supplies, more trucks, more protection money. For the Taliban, the war is self-funding – the donors being the taxpayers of the coalition nations – the US and UK in particular.

As we pointed out – it is all done under a doctrine of "plausible deniability". We do not pay the Taliban – oh no! But we build their payments into the contractors' fees, which they then pass on, to ensure safe passage.

And we think we can win this "war", the way we are fighting it? With due respect to the current CGS, he is whistling in the wind.

COMMENT THREAD

Failure in Iraq

2009-12-08T20:44:00.003Z

In another valuable contribution to the remarkably sparse debate on the British occupation of Iraq, MP and former Grenadier Guard Adam Holloway has published a short paper headed, "The Failure of British Political and Military Leadership in Iraq."

Holloway takes the view that the Labour Government has suborned the Armed Forces from the very top to half the way down, creating a system that often enforces what is politically convenient, not what is militarily right. This systemic failure, he argues, began with the invasion of Iraq and continues to this day. This failure, he tells us, continues to prevent us from learning from our mistakes, and is condemning us to repeat them, as we are doing in Afghanistan.

In his pamphlet, we are taken through the early political stages which led to the invasion of Iraq, against the background that, from the moment British Forces crossed into Iraq, a process of back-pedalling had begun. They were put under increasing pressure to get out, by a political leader who had committed his country to war based on his political ambitions, not the considered military advice of his generals.

We are given a useful reminder that, in the run-up to the war, the original plan had been for Britain to invade through Turkey. It was not until 24 December 2002 that the planning was switched. This, undoubtedly, affected the degree of preparedness.

Holloway then explores the vagueness of the strategic objectives for the war and the confusion between the overt objective of neutralising a perceived threat of WMD and the Bush's real objective of regime change. Caught up in fabricating reasons to invade and occupy Iraq, our leaders never stopped to set a clear and achievable goal for Britain's involvement.

The confusion and dishonesty amongst our political leaders created the central problem for our military. Post-invasion, the goals started with grand ambitions of "rebuilding a nation" and bringing peace and democracy, and deteriorated to "holding the line" so there could be "an Iraqi solution to an Iraqi problem". When even that could not be achieved, our political and military leaders decided to withdraw the troops and let the Americans fill the gap, while claiming credit for this "success".

The trouble was, adds Holloway, our leaders at the top of the MoD, the Chiefs of Staff and senior civil servants became caught up in the opaque, politicised confusion. This had a knock-on effect on the ground, where officers had a very poor understanding of the political and social dynamics of Basra. Even as late as 2008 the British HQ in Iraq was still only able to define the focus as "the consent of the population".

Then, in perhaps the strongest part of his paper, Holloway describes a "failure of moral courage", invoking Field Marshall Alanbrooke, Churchill's senior general. He had said of the Prime Minister: "the first time I tell him that I agree with him when I don't will be the time to get rid of me, for then I can be no more use to him". The contrast with those inside the MoD building today is damning and pervades even operational theatres.

In the middle of the fiercest battles in Iraq, our soldiers stood their ground and fought bravely but many of those at the top of the MoD failed to provide the Government with hard facts and choices and confront them with the strategic implications of under-resourcing the Army. Our soldiers were expected to give their lives if necessary, but those at the very top shrank from committing "career suicide" by standing up to politicians and telling them the uncomfortable truth.

Nowhere was this military spinning more apparent than in the way the campaign was directed. "The Chiefs of Staff realised that, for political reasons, the Government was never going to commit the resources needed to deal with the Shiite militias. Thus the Chiefs reasoned that if they couldn't fight and beat an insurgency, they had to redefine the problem. The politically driven Shiite insurgency was simply redefined as mass criminality and therefore a problem for the local police, not soldiers. Military spokesmen were keen to explain that Basra was similar to "Palermo, not Beirut".

Whilst this may have been temporarily convenient for the political-military leadership, the long-term consequence was that no coherent campaign was ever developed for Basra until 2008 and the political causes and objectives of the insurgency were never addressed. As an officer from the Basra Consulate put it in 2006 "what's the point in providing intelligence on the insurgency when the Government won’t accept that there is an insurgency".

There was also an aspect of pride. British officers had talked at such length about their expertise in counterinsurgency, after decades of experience in Northern Ireland and Malaya, that they could not be seen to have got it wrong.

The combination of self-delusion, hubris and ignorance was behind the disastrous decisions that were taken in Basra. Military commanders could not take a long-term view as they only spent six months in the job and no significant intelligence database was built. The result was that key knowledge was lost in the biannual handover and short-termism took over, a mentality that drove the most disastrous decision of the Iraq conflict – abandoning al-Amarah.

Over the period of Britain's involvement in Iraq, the graph - as it were - moved steadily downwards. But every six months there was a little spike of hope upwards. This reflected the departures of senior officers out of Basra at the end of their six month tours, as it had been left on a high note - as they presented the place in better condition at the end of their tour than at the beginning.

Short-termism coloured most decisions, The decisions to hand over provinces in Iraq were progressively driven by commanders who were being judged not by how well the job was done, but by how quickly. Corners were cut in other areas too. The decision was taken not to embed British military advisors into the Iraqi Army despite a clear history of this being advisable.

Thus does Holloway ask why those at the top did not stand up for what they knew was right? His answer is that, in the "super-politicised" environment that the MOD had become, a "good news only" culture began to emerge within the military – the culture of politically aware military advice. Pliant and conformist civil servants in uniform were systematically promoted at the expense of capable independent-minded officers. No one would get promoted for saying things are going badly. As a result, few were prepared to tell the Emperor that he was naked.

When some were extended in post, they were not being rewarded for military success, but for toeing the line and keeping mouths shut. As one senior and very well informed person put it: "when the most senior in the military stand up and says this is what happened, which of us can say otherwise?"

Matching military advice to the prevailing political wind is one thing, though, but when the heads of the Armed Forces start actively parroting political propaganda and burying inconvenient truths on behalf of the Government, a serious line has been crossed, says Holloway.

What remains troubling though is that commanders and political leaders seem determined not to learn from their mistakes. Commanders seem threatened by the idea of admitting failure and learning from mistakes. Thus, no one from the UK armed forces had ever thought to contact the retired Afghan Communist General who had managed to hold Helmand province for a full year after the Soviets left and who had been the great expert on running tribal militias to provide local security across the area.

When a serving TA officer published an extremely well researched and persuasive paper in The British Army Review (the Army's professional journal) called "A Comprehensive Failure: British Civil-Military Strategy in Helmand Province", which was damning of official attempts to spin failures into PR successes, the Assistant Chief of the General Staff intervened.

He issued written instructions effectively removing full editorial control of the journal from its editor and stipulated that political clearance must be sought before the publication of any such articles in the future, due to the embarrassment caused to politicians.

What is more worrying was his further direction that in the run-up to the Iraq Inquiry there must be no publication of "lessons-learned" from Iraq by serving officers, including those who were actually there. In effect, British officers are no longer free to propose critical and reflective ideas - fresh-thinking that is essential for success, if those proposals might embarrass the Labour Government.

This ghastly culture continues, concludes Holloway, endangering our national security. By continuing to bury the truth, we greatly reduce or even kill the chances of hard fought-for success.

Our troops need to be adequately funded and equipped. We must look again at how we structure our national defence. But most importantly, we need to relearn the lessons of Churchill and Alanbrooke. We need a culture that encourages a system with integrity, independence and a robust relationship with whichever Minister happens to be in the MoD this season - and the rather more able ones next.

COMMENT THREAD

Corrupt, untrained, underpaid, illiterate

2009-12-06T18:00:00.004Z

The Sunday Times laments the poor state of the Afghan security forces, with a long piece headed: "Corrupt, untrained, underpaid, illiterate: the forces waiting to take over." This is by no means the first article to draw attention to the parlous state of the forces, on which the Coalition exit plan entirely depends.

In fact – as you might expect – the problem is very far from new. In 1900, Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman was recalling the state of the army he had inherited from his predecessor, noting that it was "defective in certain respects" ...

... one of them being that the soldiers did not get their pay regularly, and had certain privileges granted them of extorting money from the subjects without any punishment being inflicted on them for so doing. The officers were lazy, steeped in indulgence and vices of all kinds, gambling, opium-smoking, Indian hemp-smoking, and other bad habits which cannot be mentioned ...

The army was in such a condition, he ventured, that it could not stand against the English army half so well as any ordinary chief.

By1900 – ten years after he had assumed the Crown - Rahman claimed (with the benefit of a considerable English subsidy) that his army was "properly organised upon the modern European military method". His soldiers were paid regularly. Every cavalry regiment and artillery battalion was complete with its sappers and miners for trench work, engineers, bands, tents, medical corps, etc.

At that stage, Rahman wrote that he was making every effort to provide himself with 1,000,000 million fighting men, armed with the most modern weapons and war material. He died a year later, his dream unfulfilled. In 1919, when his successor launched the third Anglo-Afghan war, he was only able to muster 50,000 troops.

Confronting them was Lt-Gen George Molesworth, who gave the following evaluation of the Afghan army:

Afghan regular units ... were ill-trained, ill-paid, and probably under strength. The cavalry was little better than indifferent infantry mounted on equally indifferent ponies. Rifles varied between modern German, Turkish and British types, to obsolete Martinis and Snyders. Few infantry units had bayonets.

Artillery was pony-drawn, or pack, and included modern 10cm Krupp howitzers, 75mm Krupp mountain guns and ancient 7 pounder weapons. There were a few, very old, four-barrel Gardiner machine guns. Ammunition was in short supply and distribution must have been very difficult. For the artillery much black powder was used, both as a propellant and bursting charge for shells. The Kabul arsenal workshops were elementary and mainly staffed by Sikh artificers with much ingenuity but little real skill. There was no organised transport and arrangements for supply were rudimentary.

Such is how it has always been. Most serious fighting by the Afghans has always involved large numbers of tribesmen, organised and led by their chiefs – either acting alone or in support of the Afghan army. Not ever in modern times has the state been able to field a credible force.

Patrick Cockburn, commenting in The Independent on Sunday on the late Obama plan, notes that he envisages training 100,000 new Afghan soldiers and 100,000 new policemen over the next three years.

But, asks Cockburn, where are these recruits to come from? Given the high desertion rate, the combat strength of the Afghan army is reportedly only 46,000 troops in a country that is larger than France.

Furthermore, he warns, these troops, and particularly the officer corps, are already disproportionately Tajik, the ethnic group to which a quarter of Afghans belong. The US can only increase the military strength of the Afghan state swiftly by skewing it towards the Tajiks, who were always the core of opposition to the Taliban. This will increase sectarian hatreds.

And this is what is supremely worrying about the current coalition military strategy. Its leaders, Brown and Obama included, have convinced themselves that they are going to be able progressively to hand over responsibility to the Afghan security forces as soon as 18 months. They will then take the load and maintain peace and security.

But, as The Sunday Times article points out, of the police alone – citing a police commander, talking about his recruits: "They start from such a low level. I need five years ... With all the attention of the international community, maybe three years minimum." At that is given that the system is being organised properly, which it is not.

The plan is moonshine. Coalition leaders are locked into a fantasy of their own making, relying on the creation of mythical armies with false capabilities, dreams that will never be realised. Even in decades and with more money than the US could afford, there is not going to be an effective Afghan security force in five or even ten years time.

One can live with a degree of optimism and hope, but the current plans really are based on fantasy. Nothing good can come of them.

COMMENT THREAD

Drop the dead donkey

2009-12-03T15:44:00.002Z

Taliban fighters are using donkeys as deadly four-legged bombs to attack British troops in Afghanistan, reports The Daily Telegraph.

The paper adds that "the incident has alarmed military chiefs concerned that the Taliban are now using desperate methods to attack occupying forces." I sincerely hope that this is ill-informed rhetoric on the part of the paper. The use of a "donkey bomb" was reported by The Times in April this year, so it hardly suggests that the Taliban is now - or at all – using "desperate methods".

In fact, "animal-borne" IEDs are not new. One was recorded in Columbia in September 2003, used with devastating effect. In 2006, the Palestinians were reported to be experimenting with explosives-rigged stuffed animals.

In Iraq, animal carcasses were not infrequently used to hide IEDs and in August 2005 were reported to be rigging live dogs with explosives. But even that was not new. In the Second World War, the Germans experimented with dogs carrying radio-signal initiated bombs to destroy Allied tanks.

Nor is the use of live creatures confined to "terrorists". In one of the more bizarre scenarios dreamt up by American scientists during World War II, hundreds of tiny bats, each wearing a small napalm bomb strapped to its chest, were to descend on Japanese cities before exploding and spreading uncontrollable fires.

The experiments came to an abrupt end in 1944 when, during one test, the direction of the wind changed, blowing the bats back into the US Army's headquarters, which caught fire. In another incident, some bats hid under the car of a high-ranking US officer causing it to explode.

That their use was considered by US forces in 1944 could hardly have been a sign of desperation, and neither can the use of donkeys by antagonists in Afghanistan be thus considered. It merely reflects the inventiveness and flexibility of guerrilla forces when up against a better-equipped enemy, in a country where heavily-laden donkeys are more common than cars.

The worrying thing is that we see a narrative being created here. The local introduction of an old tactic – not met by ae particular batch of troops – is reported as "new" and then interpreted as a "sign of desperation". By such means to we (possibly the Army, and certainly the media) fool ourselves into thinking that we are achieving something more than is actually the case.

COMMENT THREAD